Agricultural Bank of China Stock

Welcome to 2026 results announcement. I'm very happy to be here with the [indiscernible] Bank of China [indiscernible] online.

First of all, the operational performance of Agriculture Bank of China. 2026 is the third year of the 5-year plan. The Agriculture Bank of China implemented the decision arrangement of CPC Central Committee and the State Council [indiscernible] work to the main line of the pro high-quality development. Here, I would like to share with you the status for the operational performance of our bank.

The profit growth rate exceeded 5% in the first half year. Net profit by 5.8%, an increase of 1 percentage point compared to the first quarter and our operating income increased by 11.2% year-on-year, an increase of 0.7 percentage points compared to the third quarter, showing good growth momentum. Also, we -- in the first half year, the return on net assets was 10.14%, maintaining a leading level among comparable peers. The set of data is that the increase in financing exceeded CNY 3 trillion in the first half year Agriculture Bank of China effectively tapped into the financing needs of the real economy with a large-scale financing increase, including loans and bonds reaching CNY 2.2 trillion, of which the increase in local and foreign currency loans amounted to CNY 1.69 trillion, increase of 6.2% increase in bond investment CNY 1.52 trillion with a growth rate of 1.6%.

Average daily balance of deposits amounted to CNY 39.5 trillion with an increase of CNY 3.7 trillion, a growth rate of 1.2%. Thirdly, the net interest margin expanded by 2 basis points, benefiting from the continued effectiveness of our price management in the first half year, the net interest margin of Agriculture Bank of China was 1.28%, 2 basis points higher than that of the first quarter, showing stabilizing trend deposit cost of bank was 1.13%, down 21 basis points from the end of last year.

The cost of liability improved steadily the nonperforming loans ratio decreased by another 2 basis points to 1.25%, down 2 basis points from the beginning of the year, the fifth consecutive quarter of decline that the expected net gap between nonperforming loans and total loans remained for 24 consecutive quarters, reflecting the strict standards for risk classification. The provision coverage ratio for loans was 18%, down 1 basis point from the beginning of the year. The provision coverage ratio was 29.1% with provision balance remaining above CNY 1 trillion. [indiscernible] capacity the dividend payout ratio was raised by 1 percentage point in order to actively reward investors, the share achievement of the bank's development, the Board of Directors proposed to pay the interim dividend for 2020 by raising the ratio by 1 percentage point to 31%.

These are the achievements we have in the first half year, and these are the very important operational success, reflecting a balanced approach between profit growth and investment returns. It also represents a balanced consideration between expansion and net interest margin improvement. Second, I would like to share with you the main work of the management team. First of all, we continue to commit to the agriculture rural areas and farmers business and solidifying our position as a leading bank in rural revitalization. The agriculture and rural areas and farmers are the tensioned to AC has always carried forward with a fine tradition of serving agriculture and rural areas and aims to be a leading bank in rural revitalization. In the first half year, we focus on food security.

Also, we focus on rural industry, rural development and other key areas related to strengthening and benefiting farmers and continue to increase the credit supply. Now as of the end of June, the balance of loans in country-level areas reached CNY 11.9 trillion, an increase of 9% over the beginning of the year. The balance of the banks exclusive product for farmers reached CNY 2.1 trillion, an increase of 14.2% over the beginning of the year. The balance of deposits in country-level areas was CNY 14.9 trillion with an increase of CNY 4.9 trillion. It contributed 40% to the bank's total deposit growth. proportion of level branches rose to 5.8%.

The ABC has always taken as a vision to serve the real economy, focusing on the comp old and new growth drivers and the trend of industrial transformation upgrading continuously optimizing the allocation of financial resources. Fintech, we high-quality measures to support the building of a country with a strong technology foundation. The growth rate of loans to tech companies and small and medium-sized segment stood at 24% and 29%, respectively. [indiscernible] investment [indiscernible] have been established in total invested in 56 fintech innovation projects amounting to over CNY 5.7 billion. We will step up efforts in underwriting and investing in fintech innovation bonds with such bonds [indiscernible] half of the year and also the insurance exceeded CNY 120 billion. The balance of self- amounted to CNY 13.1 billion, up by 9.7% with a focus on inclusive financing, we strengthened the capacity for sustainable development.

The balance of inclusive loan reached CNY 4.8 trillion with an increase of CNY 32.4 billion and the number of inclusive and borrowers reached 5.5 million with an increase of number of physical social security card users reached CNY 3.84 billion and the sale of pension trust management was CNY 43.6 billion with a 14.3% increase in the number of individual pension clients deposit amount rose by 26.7% digital finance and application of new generation communication technology cloud, computing, artificial intelligence and other industries with loans to the digital economy increasing by 15.1%.

In response to the national policy to boost the consumption we focus on housing mortgage, daily consumption and other areas and kept increasing the credit supply the balance of personal consumption loans, including credit cards amounted to CNY 1.5 trillion with a decrease of CNY 49.054 billion. The country's high level opening up and the development of the the fourth quarter settlement reached CNY 1.9 trillion and the internal settlement volume of domestic branches amounted to 8.5 trillion. As of the end of June, the total number of personal customers of AD reached 90 million, maintaining the first place in the industry.

The number of corporate customers exceeded 14 million with an increase of 10,000 since the beginning of the year. The number of credit card customers was 7.9 million with an increase of 2.2 million. The number of personal mobile bank customers 629 million with 282 million monthly active users and 29 million monthly active users on mobile devices has always been customer oriented and has continuously strengthened the construction of its customer service system, achieving common development with customers.

In terms of individual customers, the business system of customer and customer groups such as individuals and citizens and providing differentiated services based on their needs. For the corporate clients based on the customers' needs, we provide comprehensive service to medium-sized enterprise customers and provide the customized service to the medium-sized clients and the convenience service for inclusive micro enterprises. We will also adhere to the technology-driven transformation. And based on different scenarios, we continue to optimize account opening process in which online product and enhance the capabilities of mobile and online service to further enhance client experience.

We also stay true to our original aspiration and founding mission to serve the people with financial services, promote rural service project, introduce sells for rural services, provide quality financial service for special client groups. Fourthly, we must forge ahead with reform and leverage smart bank construction to drive business development. ABC actively embraces the ways of AI development to accelerate the construction of smart banks and take the application of intelligent agents as the starting point pro coordinated development of business technology and data and continue to improve the AI capability system, we will accelerate the digital business innovation.

And in terms of product innovation, we have built a digital operations platform driven by AI technology and facilitated by tablet helping and increased online credit. In terms of channel innovation, we released the 11.2 version of personal online banking and continue to the personalized service of mobile banking app, exploring construction of for service impression. We will also enhance the intelligence of risk prevention control, innovating the AI risk control agent and to upgrade the entire process, the financing risk control to be more intelligent, we will deepen the AI application in compliance risk scenario and effectively enhance the quality and efficiency of the compliance management.

We will also strengthen the support for frontline staff, and we need self-developed AI agents, the Dragon to adapt to the technical requirements of different scenarios and incorporate an AI digital assistance. And we have completed the [indiscernible] new model application and try to continue to enhance our AI capabilities. This effort is to strengthen the defense line and as for the high-quality development, preventing prevention and control is always our key task financial work, we will continue to focus on the risk prevention control.

We adhere to prudent and stable business strategy, continuously improve the comprehensive risk management system. In terms of credit risk, we focus on control the increase, reduce the stock and strengthening the foundation, continuously optimizing the credit structure and constantly improving the risk prevention control system for inclusive retail with agriculture Bank in China. We will also continue to improve the market risk system, the annual policy for risk management and financial market business and interbank business and strengthen risk control requirements for market business.

We track and study market changes, proactively optimize business strategies, strengthen risk control and keep relevant indicators stable. We closely follow international situations and market changes. Dynamically adjust response strategies and ensure risk control. On technology base, we the location of computer room and continue to enhance regional disaster recovery capabilities. We also improved the network security protection, actively respond to external shocks and new challenges. The average daily trading volume of the distributed core system is CNY 1.96 billion with a year-on-year increase of 17% and the serviceability during business hours is 100 hours.

We [indiscernible] about the future development plan. I believe there are 3 changes of plans. And this has created great space of development for the Agricultural Bank of China. And also the economic structure is changing profoundly in the first 7 months of this year, the proportion of bond financing increased and this whole financial structure is changing. So this has imposed new challenges for the banks. We need to find new benefit spaces and possibilities.

And also at the same time, we noticed that the AI technology is accelerating in its growth. So we need to integrate the AI system into our business management system. And also, we need to control the risks related to AI development and AI technologies. For ABC, we need to hold on to our all advantages, and we need to find our position in the whole economic development of China. and we need to focus on the economic upgrading of our country, and we will have more efforts put into the country-level economy and real economy development and focus on our 5 priorities of financial development and upgrade our own credit system in order to better serve the economic upgrading and transformation.

And also, we will have more attention paid to the international financial market and how we cooperate with our partners. And also, we need to seize this opportunity of AI technology development to empower our whole process of system of development using AI technology. And looking into the second half of the business operation, our executives and our Board of Directors will coordinate the keys of works we have done in the previous half of the year of 2026, and we are going to increase our quality of asset, and we will try to improve the quality of our assets and also to create more value for our investors in the future.

And that's my introduction. Thank you very much. Now let's go to the Q&A session.

Let's give the floor to the Secretary of BOD, Madam Liu Qing.

Thank you very much, President Wang. Now let's go to the Q&A session. In this session Okay. Let's give the microphone to this madam.

Thank you very much. I'm from CCTV, and I've listened to President Wang's introduction. We noticed that the operation revenue and the net profit has increased a very high level of growth, and it's very resilient and a lot of growth are higher than the first season. So my question is for the executives, what are your expectations for the second half of year's growth? And what are the driving forces for the growth?

Thank you so much for the question. Just as you've mentioned, we have always stick to the path of high-quality development. We want to have a long-term development, and we want to have an active position in this changing dynamics of the economy. So in the first half of the year, while we are serving the real economy and while we are having this very good performance, we have also made a lot of progress in the indicators of financial performances. And all these progress have shown our very stable pattern of development and our strategy for stabilized development.

And just as Mr. Wang has introduced, looking into the second half of the year, we are very confident to keep on to this track of faster development and maintain a good operation revenue. And if we look at the outside environment, we can see that the economy is showing a trend that the dynamics are towards the internal forces and also the whole structure of the economy is upgrading and optimizing. And that has shown there is a great resilience to the China's economic development. And this stable macroeconomic situation has created a very good environment for ABC's development for our high-quality development.

And if we look into the past of our history's development and if we look at ABC's own situation of development, we can find that we have our competitive advantages always. We have always focused on how to combine our own advantage with the whole environment development. And also, we have a very great and profound basis of clients. We have very comprehensive products and a very solid capital and assets, which will be our support for future resilience and potential of development.

So speaking of the specific driving forces, first of all, we will hold on to our advantage of asset operation, which will help ensure the income from the interest payment. The Bank of China have always stick to the large number of networks all over China, especially at country level. And now with this rural revitalization policy of China and to build a new type of rural area policy of China, we have our own driving force, and we will continue on this path.

And of course, at the same time, we will have more diversified advantage being explored. And for the second half of this year, we will continue on this path. And secondly, we have already achieved the cost of liabilities continuing to decline, and that is in an orderly manner. And for the second half of the year, we will continue on this path. For the second -- first half of the year, this average daily increase in deposit is at a reasonable level and is providing a very good support for the real economy development.

And on the other hand, it also helps us in reducing this cost of liability. And if we look at this whole trend of development, it seems that the existing debt will gradually mature during the second half of the year and the continuous decline in debt cost will continue for a long time. And yes, that's the trend we are going to stick to for the second half of the year.

And thirdly, we have already provided more and more of financial services and solutions, and we have already made our contribution to the optimization of the economic structure. And this is the whole trend of the whole China's financial market. There is this changing in the financial structure. And so facing this trend, the ABC will, of course, consolidate our existing advantage. And at the same time, we will have more plans and strategies towards the future to have more long-term transaction capacities cultivated and to improve our capital management capacity, which can help us get through any kind of economic cycle.

And fourthly, we have already achieved this improvement in risk control, and that will help us to have a more solid foundation for future development. We have always regarded this risk control as our foundation of all kinds of operation. And during the 14th 5-year plan, our NLP decline rate is ranking #1 in the 4 major banks of China. And also we have this very good performance, speaking of this allowance coverage and other aspects. And these have all set very good foundation and very solid boundary for us to control the risks within a certain field and level.

So all these four factors have shown our achievements. They have helped us to gain a very solid growth in the first half of the year, and they will continue to help us in the second half of the year. Thank you very much for the introduction about ABC's profit-making ability. Now let's give the floor to this journalist in the middle.

Thank you. I'm from the Xinhua News Agency, Xinhua Financial News. Mr. Wang, you mentioned that the NLP rate have been declined for 5 consecutive years, and there is this growing capacity in terms of this allowance rate. So what is your expectation for the whole year's asset quality operation and especially for inclusive retail asset quality?

Well, thank you for your question. We have always -- ABC has always put the risk control in the core of all our works. We always stick to the path of prudent and stable operation. We want to have this very stable and very careful risk control, which can make our whole business operation more resilient and more sustainable. And our whole ABC's asset quality has the following features.

First, this NLP ratio is dropping. The NPL ratio is dropping. By the end of June, this NPL rate is 1.65%. And while we stick to this category, very strict category of categorization, we still maintain this good level. And also, there is this BP dropping compared to the year 2025. So all these numbers have shown that we have quite good risk control in terms of the asset quality. And another feature of us is that the expected ratio is dropping compared to the beginning of this year and especially the expected [ Cesar ] gap is dropping. is dropping for a consecutive 24 seasons. And this negative number is very important for us because it shows the quality asset of us.

And also, this allowance coverage rate is very high. This balance of the allowance coverage rate has exceeded CNY 1 trillion, and that's a very good foundation. And for the first half of this year, the growth in the whole size has reached 29%, and that is a very high level. And this number is ranking the top among other counterparts in China's banking market. And also, you've mentioned this retail asset quality, especially the inclusive retail banking services. well, speaking of the asset quality of this aspect, we have always put our attention on the risk control as always. And we will make more efforts to deal with the remaining nonperforming loans in this aspect, in this retail of the inclusive finance.

And looking into the second half of the year, what we feel is that we still need to keep the credit and asset quality of ABC at a very good level. So speaking of all the indicators, no matter the nonperforming loan, the expected or the allowance coverage ratio and all the indicators, we still need to pay special attention to them. And we are going to do the specific things to achieve such goals. The first is we will keep optimizing the credit structure because we always say if you want to serve the macro economy, the finance, you need to understand the macroeconomic situation.

And also, we always want to understand the situation of certain industries if we want to provide some financial and credit support for such industries. And that's why we will have more customized targeted design of the credit resources, which can suit the need of our country's economic strategic development. And we will pay special attention to the structural risks of all industries and to control disorderly competitive situations. And we will reduce the excess overcapacity, and we will try to control the low-quality loans for our customers.

And also, another measure is we will have a long-term mechanism, which can help us to look into the future and analyze the situation of things that might happen. This is going to be a long-term mechanism for us, especially for the risks related to our customers and the high-risk customers and also the different categories of customers and how to manage the loans of those already exited the customers and also the loans that are about to do or are due to -- we are all going to pay special attention and strengthen the control of all these categories.

And at the same time, we have already done a lot for the inclusive retail financing system. And now the whole society is paying special attention to the inclusive retail finance risk control. And we are looking at this whole situation. We are following it closely. We are having strict control of it, and we will have more policies and strategies based on our working reality like reconstructing our whole bank's credit system to manage the credit structure.

A very important measure of us is that for any credit measures, we believe it is very important. It is the front line of risk control because it's the source of any other operation of businesses. And another important line for us is the risk control and legal compliance control. And this will help us to work with the real business of credit risk control and together to have a more effective outcome.

Management is a very important line and the risk management department for second line of [indiscernible] risk manage policy system and effectively play the role of and talent on business lines with the platform from now functioning and the internal audit department of the bank as the third line of defense for risk management will focus on strengthening the independent evaluation effect of the first lines of defense and conduct the penetrating supervision to ensure that the risk management system does not lose.

At the same time, we attach to external supervision on the fourth line of defense for the supervision and the focus of which is to form internal and external collaboration in risk control and joint [indiscernible] failure of control. Therefore, the fourth line to prevent the dispersion and others to prevent failure to control and others to prevent failure. The second step is to actively promote new business development models. We have also considered this repeatedly and have promoted the establishment of a new business development model with the top level design of the branch and operation of the second branch and the template marketing of the subbranch helps the business to focus more on local logistics financial ecosystem to develop credit plans to high-quality customers and standard marketing activities, creating proactive customer acquisition, batch customer acquisition and customer acquisition business development models.

Compared with the past retail loans, there should be a big difference from fragment to proactive customer acquisition. The third is to promote integration between online and offline and we need to formulate the unique competitive advantage in ABC's credit management. This is mainly achieved to leverage [indiscernible] and widespread and the client manager team is strong. 400 employees and we feel that these employees can play their role as well, it is crucial for it and promote the model combining on-site and remote work and make great efforts to ensure that the onsite work is solid. We also realize that it is by relying on the models never relying on one model.

Therefore, we adhere to the separation of examination and approval post restriction and mutual restrain business mechanism of supervision and and mutual intervention to make up for the shortcomings of model decision. We feel this ourselves because the important part of the bank's credit [indiscernible]. We simply use AI models, we feel that due diligence will be good due diligence should have at least 3 characteristics.

The first one is that it should be on site. The second character that it should be able to ensure authentic and be responsible management. So we feel that in [indiscernible] those. But in the end results. We are very firm on this point. On the premise of [indiscernible] household loans by using [indiscernible] we also focus on the improvement of the responsible person for inclusive of the credit process and [indiscernible].

First of all, making sure the managers of branches fulfill the [indiscernible] loans or we shouldn't simply push the frontline employ. We also need to focus on the second tier branches, the management [indiscernible] and the [indiscernible] out. We have clarified risk due diligence exemption further strengthen the provision of the performance of management responsible and created management and lending. In our opinion to do a good job in lending, we need to ensure that loans [indiscernible] should be further optimized and strengthen the credit management is important. We need to [indiscernible] for the entire bank risk control is to strengthen [indiscernible] on rational and policies such as financial measures we need to strictly implement the presale and adopt a policy-based approach for each project and the plan for each project and we can reduce real estate risk and in the past development loans put a lot of pressure on banks and lead to some nonperforming loans.

There are various reasons for this, but one of the reasons is the [indiscernible] in the first half year from the overall situation, we have learned the nonforming loan ratio of the estate industry of compared with the beginning of the year remained stable. On local government debt, we adhere to the principle of and standardize and support the market-oriented [indiscernible] of financing reforms. But at the same time, we also pay attention to strengthening the monitoring of the basis of the platform after the [indiscernible] handle new financing in a compliant manner and resolutely guard against the red line of not adding new hidden debt. We also realize that asset quality is always the lifeline of the bank's operational management.

We [indiscernible] control and compliance management, there can be no high-quality development firmly establish and achievement to the bottom line. Also we need to [indiscernible] in addition to management and measures. We also need to promote the whole bank to build a good credit risk culture, including the culture based on the quality of organization culture and with matching the professional forward-looking management culture, risk control culture of human collaboration and digital empowerment and so on. By doing so, we can strengthen risk control measures, and we are confident for the long-term future development.

Now let's welcome the next question. Analyst name is a bank analyst at China Securities.

I have a question about deposits. We know that deposit is the strength of ABC. We see that the repricing of the deposit is approaching, and we have maintained relatively good retention rate of the deposits. We also noticed that liability cost of has the first half of the year. However, we noticed that the overall pattern of social capital utilization has undergone profound changes the demand for wealth management among also increasing day by day. This question about the liability strategy.

Thank you very much for raising the question. We had closely focused on serving rural revitalization and the real economy actively aligned with the macro policies, regulatory requirements and market changes and continue to achieve the high-quality development in deposit business. To summarize, it mainly shows the following three features: First, deposit growth continued to show a good momentum of stable quantity and high quality. With the average daily balance of all deposit accounts reaching RMB 39.5 trillion at the end of the first half of the year 2027, an increase of RMB 3.67 trillion, up 10.2% year-on-year both growth rate and outperformed their competitors.

The deposit ratio decreased by 3.6 percentage points year-on-year. It is the only bank among the competitors that has kept the ratio below 3% for 9 consecutive quarters. This has provided high-quality financial resources for real economy. Second, the core advantages of deposit business have been further consolidated from the perspective customer structure, the average daily balance of personal deposits in China reached CNY 212,800 accounting for 4.5% of all deposits in China with an increase of CNY 1.56 trillion in the first half of the year, maintaining the leading position in the industry for 18 consecutive quarters.

From the perspective region structure, the average daily balance of country deposits in China stood at CNY 1.73 trillion accounting for 44.6% of all in China. Also the contribution rate has increased by 0.1 percentage points compared to the beginning of the year. It has further played role of the coordinated development of deposit quantity and price has been achieved and the efficiency has continued to be reduced due to growth of deposits in the past few years and the trend of maturity, the stock of time deposits with higher interest rate has entered a cycle of concentrated repricing, especially for 3 years deposits and the reduction of the benchmark interest rate up to 135 against the backdrop of interest expense ratio of deposits in the first half year decreased significantly compared with the previous year [indiscernible] continue to drive steady growth of deposits and provide high-quality financial guarantee for serving of the economy; secondly, we will continue to consolidate and different competitive advantage; and our third measure be taken is to have overall a range of all sources of our funding.

We are going to follow the pattern of the social capital flow and also on the basis of successfully handling the transfer of regular funds due for maturity. And at the same time, we need to make a formulation for the general deposits and central bank loans and other interbank deposits and accelerate the transformation of the settlement payment and other deposits. And altogether, we want to optimize the growth structure of the source of capital. And fourthly, for the second half of our year, we are going to strive to maximize the benefits derived from the repricing of deposits.

And also, we are going to strengthen the differentiated management of deposits throughout the whole bank to make the cost of the payment of interest to drop gradually.

Thank you for the question. I'm from China Business Newspaper. We know that the country level business is showing the advantage -- differentiated advantage of ABC's operation, and we know that there is a very large proportion of such part of business. So my question is, what is your plan for the next step of country-level business development? And are there any long-term or short-term plans?

Thank you for the question. I'm going to answer your question. And from the start of this year, ABC have followed the country policies to help the rural revitalization and support the rural and agriculture and the farmers development. As we have shared, according to the 15th Five-Year Plan of China, we should promote the high-quality development of rural area and the rural economy and to form a long-term mechanism of modern agriculture development and to better expand the great results already achieved by power alleviation efforts of China, and that is also the future direction of ABC's development.

So for ABC, we will always hold on to our banner of serving the agriculture, the rural economy, the rural area and the farmers. We will always try to improve the contribution of coffee level business performance we hope that our country-level business can always account for about 40% of the whole business. And we are going to do the following things. First, to serve the agriculture, the rural area and the rural residents will always be our priority. We are going to have the provision of all kinds of resources to achieve this goal.

And the financing at country level is mainly about credit and focusing on the important agriculture-related projects in the 15th 5-year plan of China, we should know that there are such some realities like the living condition in the country level is not that good, and there are very large demand for the credit. So we are going to have targeted policies and measures to deal with the real situation. And we hope our credit and our businesses can solve the real needs of the rural residents.

And at the same time, we are going to work with like the government and other industries, especially in terms of the supply chain, the value chain and the industrial chain of agriculture. And at the technology level aspect of agriculture development, we are going to introduce more policies and technologies to the key cities and to introduce the key mechanisms of our bank and of the whole economy to the key counties and rural areas. And at the same time, we will know the exact goals of rural agriculture and rural area and resident development.

We will make our efforts to build some products that can serve the construction of modern rural service center. And also, we need to follow the strategy of our country. We will make our 15th Five-Year plan to serve the rural area and to apply our policies, strategies and technologies to our agriculture and country-level service-related programs. And in terms of integrated service, we are going to have the special financial debt and programs offered to the rural area and agriculture related to the customers to better serve the rural revitalization and the rural residents.

And of course, at the same time, we will always stick to the control of risk as our bottom line. While we are serving the real needs of the rural area, we should always implement the regulations in terms of all kinds of retail and other services, especially we are going to improve our level of supervision of future risks in certain industries. And also, we are going to pay attention to the legal compliance management of programs related to agriculture and rural residents to make sure that the country level economy remains stable.

And at the same time, we are going to improve the mechanism of the agriculture rural area [indiscernible] department management. Management is always the foundation, and that is very important for us to improve the service quality we can provide for rural revitalization. And also, we are going to prioritize our country-level business in terms of the policy, resources and the future plans, including the financing, the human recruitment and the new channel development. And we are going to build more networks at town and country level this year.

We are hoping to have 2,000 more of such points this year. And also, we are going to offer more online services to more county-level business customers. And also, we are going to use AI and other technology to empower our service for the rural area and the residents and agriculture-related business. And we hope we can improve the experience of our customers. Thank you so much.

Now let's invite a question from online participants.

My name is Peter Zhang. I'm from JPMorgan. I want to congratulate ABC on your performance. My question is about your retail business. We noticed that you have more than 900 million individual customers and the individual deposit is also achieving a very high level about CNY 3 trillion. So what will be the key of your future individual-related business, retail business?

Thank you for the question. I will give the floor to Mr. Lin to answer.

Thank you for the question. The retail business has always been the strategic basement foundation of ABC's development. It is of really, really important position in ABC's overall development. For the first half of the year, ABC have followed this requirement of our party and central government to do the right thing and to achieve the right results and to do the difficult things correctly. In order to do that, we have 5 priorities in financial services, and that is what we have done.

And also, we have promoted the retail business in order to help the development of the internal demand for our economy, and we have provided a very professional and very targeted services, financial services for our agriculture-related customers. And we have requirement for our retail business. And if briefly sum it up, it is -- we always require that our -- any service related to the agriculture and rural area should make a step forward, should make improvement every day. I have some discussion with my colleagues.

We believe that a step every day is not easy to achieve, and it's not difficult to achieve also. But if you want to achieve it, you need to know what should be your capability needed, your resources needed to achieve it. You need to make concerted efforts. You need to say a lot of things, do a lot of things and to work with a lot of partners in order to achieve that. So for us, to work in the retail business, it is very important, especially for our future high-quality development. If we look at our statistics until the end of June, the deposit of individual is near CNY 21.3 trillion. And this growth is also very high. It's near CNY 1 trillion, and that is ranking #1 of all major banks.

And we have also achieved CNY 3.95 trillion in the individual loans and increased number, yes. And that is also helping us to achieve the increment of CNY 309.5 billion, and the balance is also ranking #1 in all counterparties in all other banks. So what we have felt is that behind the 900 million customers, 900 million accounts are 900 million units of families and their trust. And so this whole number of individual customer amount to the financial assets of them will amount to CNY 25.7 trillion, and that is a really large number.

And at the same time, we have the diversified service provided to different groups of people like the elderly customers, the people who gain salary and the new citizens and different types of customers. And also the cross-border service is also maintaining a very fast growth at a very high level, and we have achieved 71.1% of physical precious metals sales and also additional and the partnership sales reached also a very high level, 112 and also the ABC values are very high. And if we look at the nonperforming loan ratio of individual loans, it is about 1.39%. That is a relatively low level.

So if we look at the quality of asset of the whole retail sector, we can see that we are having a long-term planning, and we are having a stable growth. And we have always put our customer at the core of our future development. We hope to gain the satisfactory response of our customers.

It is like a test stone for the quality of our service. So for the next step, we are going to further implement like the fourth session of the plenary session of the 20th -- the Central Economic Work Conference and also the Central Committee of the Parties meeting and also other policies, we are going to further optimizing our whole system and to transform our businesses.

So for the retail sector, we have 4 aspects that we need to make progress. The first is that we need to have a very solid foundation for this 900 million customers individual retail service. And this retail service is covering a very large range of customers. It can be regarded as the most comprehensive, the largest inclusive finance.

So we need to make our most effort to serve our customers to make sure that the development of finance can benefit more customers. And more specifically, we need to have a very solid manner taking to develop the elderly care-related financial service. And also, we are going to pay more attention to other aspects of social welfare. And the brand of elderly care finance of ABC is called, which means the elderly care of cultural Bank of China. And we are going to make our efforts to build a comprehensive system of the elderly care-related financial service in different branches of different areas of the country to provide more people with high-quality elderly care.

We continue to improve the quality of the financial services to the [indiscernible] optimize individual pension financial products and services so that more people can enjoy a -- at the same time, we continue to deepen the service platform such as [indiscernible] elderly care [indiscernible] indiscernible] life we will further refine customer services with more accurate data labels poultry and suparetildnti manner [indiscernible] hold -- these are crucial for us to sell household loans and business loans and they are of great help.

We should take effective measures to support the development of small and micro enterprises. We should adhere to benefit both enterprises and people and regularly implement the coordination mechanism to support the financing of small and micro enterprises, which we have been. We should also do a job in the inclusive finance and focus on wholesale market business and other to further optimize the service process strengthen the support of [indiscernible] business owners, including the financial needs of individual business. The second is to [indiscernible] tool to expand domestic demand and boost the 14th [indiscernible] and [indiscernible] deepen the cooperation with e-commerce platforms carry out various forms of act [indiscernible] reduce cost for clients to access services. At the same time [indiscernible] that under better [indiscernible] and [indiscernible] services focusing on [indiscernible] consumption area consumption and the development of new business [indiscernible] accuracy, compliance and customer convenience of consumption loans and the measures to boost the first half of this year, the personal housing loans and business loans credit card exceed CNY 1 trillion, ranking among the best in the industry. The third is to hit AUM of over CNY 2 trillion and set a new benchmark for wealth.

In this regard, we will firmly aim for common prosperity and remain true to the trusted family financial planners [indiscernible] and Wealth Management, our pension business is APC pension. We decided to name our wealth management business, ABC Wealth. One focus is on product supply with a continuous emphasis on supply side reform, leveraging the advantage of group synergy and integration adhering to the principle of reasonable expectations and qualified delivery and making efforts to both innovation and selection to drive the transformation of the product show from focusing on categorphasizing high quality product that is of high quality second to focus on solid innovation to meet the financial management needs of clients throughout the lifestyle life cycle, enabling one service and professional and [indiscernible] we will further develop our create a better life for everyone.

On the one hand, we will provide integrated services to our clients adhere to the concept of one client, one bank and improve our business. The is to strengthen the development of our communities, enterprises and around our branches and other client groups. We're building ecosystem financial services at the branch. The second is to rely on platform such as mobile banking. And we to provide convenient financial services to clients also improve online services.

The third is to act and online to offline integrated digital business model, which is not simply marketing the essence of our work to drive and the under [indiscernible] the...

And also the increase of CNY 532.2 billion of increase and also a lot of new increase in terms of this SME customer-related inclusive financial services.

So for the first step we are going to do the 4 things. First of all, we are going to be deeply integrated to the general development of our country's plan, and we are going to follow the guidance of the 15th 5-year development plan of our economy, especially we are seizing the opportunity related to the cutting edge technology development and future industry development and also the upgrading of traditional industries. And we are going to focus more on the modernization of certain industries, which will all be the foundation of our innovation for the inclusive financial services.

And what we will do is to create the financial services, which are in line with the economic development and the market demand. And at the same time, we are going to make full use of the policy and monetary tools. This year, there has been new financial tools created by the central government and the central financial and fiscal coordination mechanism, which can promote domestic demand-related policies. And and all other related lists of policies to help the SMEs in terms of subsidies for their loans. And ABC is going to make full use of such policy tools to reduce the risk and to innovate the service related to products and to make the operation process of all businesses more smooth and to expand the development space for inclusive finance. And at the same time, we are going to also give full play to this mechanism to coordinate the financing of SMEs, and we're going to make full use of this platform, which provides us with the information related to the financing credit of SMEs for the further stable legal compliance development. And also, at the same time, thirdly, we are going to promote the digital development and transformation of inclusive finance.

On the one hand, we are going to promote the in-depth piloting of digital transformation of inclusive financial services. And at the same time, we are on the pilot, we are going to create more high-quality products, which can promote the digital technology-based financial inclusive services. And at the same time, we need to explore the possibility for us to use like AI agents and other technologies and precisely control the service process and to optimize our business operation and to control the risks. And firstly, at the same time, we will pay special attention to the control of risks, legal compliance issues and to explore and to carefully study the new policies related to the risk control. And we will build a group of talent who can help to strengthen the source of all the risk control and to have an online and offline integrated comprehensive system, which can control the risks. And we are going to iterate more newer models of risk control and have a timely supervision and emergency alerting system for us to control the risk. Looking ahead into the remaining of the year, we are going to have a stable path for us for further development and we are going to follow the guidance by the supervision organizations to have a stable investment and optimize the structure of development.

In order to achieve that, we are going to improve the inclusive financial system quality, both in terms of its quantity and in terms of its efficiency, which can better stimulate the vitality of the market and improve the high-quality development of the society and people's livelihood.

Thank you, Mr. Wang for the answer. Now let's give the floor to another question from a participant online.

[Interpreted]

The question is related to AI. So are there any measures for ABC to apply AI in your businesses? And for your next step, what will be your main focuses to make efforts to integrate AI more into your future operation?

[Interpreted]

Thank you for this question related to deepening the use of AI. In fact, since the start of this year, ABC has achieved a lot, especially in the smart banking sector building. And the smart banking is based on our development of the AI agent and it's led by the demand of real programs. And we have continued to improve the use of AI at a large range and at a high quality. And we have achieved 4 results in 4 aspects. The first of all is we have accelerated the innovation in terms of digital-based development of our businesses and we have accelerated a lot of digital-based process and also this whole digital process have helped us to make the operation process more smoothly and help us in the application for credit for our customers. And at the same time, AI is helping us to expand the channel of customers. We have the 11.2 version of the personal mobile bank for our individual customers and which can provide our users with more scenarios of financial services. By the end of June, our mobile bank users have exceeded 280 million, and that is leading in all banks of China. And also, we are improving our -- all kinds of digital operation capabilities for different types of customers. And at the same time, we are using AI for risk control.

For credit-related risk, we pay special attention to the supervision of risk in terms of any kind of inclusive financial services. And also, we have promoted the upgrading -- the smart upgrading of the whole process of inclusive finance and also using AI to empower our process to deal with the risky assets. And also, we are using AI for more scenarios. And such application involves the entry of clients into the system, the tracking of their background, the risk control and also the risk supervision in the financial process.

And certainly, at the same time, we have used AI to lower the burden of our branches, especially the foundation level organizations. We have this so-called ABC Cloud, which is the ABC version of Open Cloud. And this ABC Cloud is helping our staff in all kinds of scenarios, for example, in identifying the green loan and in categorizing different types of loans. And also, we have created this [ emun ], which is the AI assistant of ABC. And we have also created this smart brain, which can help us to identify the situation of a very large range and to deal with the difficulties and to provide the solutions for all kinds of cases in different scenarios. And at the same time, we're using AI in more on-stop situations like for a lot of businesses related credit card, they can use AI to call for help and to deal with the situation. And at the same time, AI is providing us at some very fundamental level, provide us with very fundamental support. Like AI is giving us very high-quality database and to help us to have the structural transformation of our database and to empower our business operation and also help us to create the knowledge bank of our ABC organization. And at the same time, we have improved our whole metrics of AI tools. We have introduced the DeepSeek, [indiscernible] and other large language model into our system, which has helped to improve our AI capacity to 1 trillion level, 1 trillion data level. And in our next step, we are going to continue to improve the quality and efficiency of AI agents. We're going to do the following things. First is to deepen the use of AI agents in all kinds of scenarios and to create a long-term mechanism for us to use the AI agents in different ways. And second, we are going to continue to strengthen the support of AI from the mental level. We are going to use AI to build -- to further build our fundamental brands and to create solutions for all kinds of situations on the cycle of financial service. And thirdly, we should always stick to our bottom line, our red line, which is the risk control. We will always control the risk related to AI management. Because the large language models, they are changing so fast. There will be some risks like the black box, the illusions of the AI. We are going to deal with these problems. And we are going to manage the scenarios based on categorization to make sure that AI is stable and controllable. Thank you.

[Interpreted]

Thank you, Mr. Wang, for answering the smart banking building of ABC. Now let's give the floor to this lady on the left.

[Interpreted]

I'm from 21st Century Economic Newspaper, we found that from the situation of 2025, the total proportion of bond stocking financing has exceeded loans in terms of the financing for agriculture. So my question is for ABC, what will be your strategy for your future investment? And what will be the return on investment for like securities in the future?

[Interpreted]

Thank you for the question. Let's give the floor to Mr. [indiscernible]

[Interpreted]

Well, thank you for the question. Actually, in terms of the security business of ABC, we can conclude it in the following sentences. First of all, we have paid much attention to the high-quality development of securities. Secondly is we have always understand that we need to follow the general trend of economic development and have a solid foundation. And third is we have always improved our trading capacity. And fourthly is that we have expanded our scale of service in terms of investment of securities. And fifthly is that we have a very high level of revenue contribution made by securities. By the end of June, there is this revenue of CNY 17.85 trillion. That is year-on-year growth of CNY 1.5 trillion compared to the previous year. And if you look at the structure, long-term ones, including the 5-year or more bonds have a large proportion. And the ABC is having a relatively lower cost of holding. And also we are having a higher level of capacity of lowering the risk and higher capacity potential.

So looking into the second half of the year, we can say that ABC is having a very adequate storage and preparation, and we have a systematic capacity to deal with the risks in the system and such capacity and the preparation can help us to deal with the fluctuation in interest rates. If we look at the overall market, we have to admit that the entire revenue level is relatively low. And the yield curve for banks is holding -- is showing a very fluctuated one. And we also know that the holding period of bonds, the appreciation in bond values and the trading opportunities is contributing to increasing return on bond investment. So that's our expectation for the coming next year.

We know this year is the beginning of the 15th 5-year plan of our country and ABC as the major Bank of China and also as the fundamental and most important agriculture-related Bank of China, we are going to seize this opportunity, and we are going to make full use of our position as a major bank of China. And we're going to follow the policy, the monetary policy and the fiscal policy of our country and to improve the efficiency of financial market development.

For our next step, we are going to follow this -- the bank's whole overall plan for the allocation of assets and have a flexible allocation of all kinds of securities and to safeguard this bottom line of security. And there are actually 2 aspects of future security investment that we need to pay attention to. The first is we need to have this judgment of future possible situations.

We need to know that because now there is this outside environment and geopolitical dangers and also the U.S. Fed and the EU, they are having all kinds of measures that we need to pay attention to. And for the second half of this year, we need to maintain a relatively stable attitude because the fiscal and monetary policy will remain relatively stable for the second half of the year.

[Interpreted]

[indiscernible] the [indiscernible] out in overseas for offshore RMB securities, we will follow the trend of [indiscernible] securities and better serve high opening of finance. This is the first step to strengthen the forward-look research and steadily carry out the securities investment business. The second strategy is to focus on our main [indiscernible] will increase the support for the implement of our major national and the development of security in areas with a focus on serving transport, electricity and energy among others as well as vital to the national economy and people's [indiscernible] the allocation of high-quality industrial bonds. The second is to focus on the 5 key areas of financial services and key areas related to agriculture are actively issue green bonds for [indiscernible] with a focus on increasing support for green finance, [indiscernible] and industry. We invest in bonds related to agriculture are support for rural entities and bank. Let me give you one example like the Agriculture Development Bank of China issue bonds, we will maintain an appropvel good [indiscernible]

So first of all, I want to set up to maintain the feature. The first one is specialized meaning professional service system is very professional. We have set up a Fintech team at both the head office and branches and establish technology Fintech service center innovation hub, creating a professional organization structure involving Fintech department and specialized branches and focus on cultivating a team of professionals who understand the industry technology and finance.

In the first half of the year, we closely follow the national strategy to expand scope of technology innovation centers, achieving full coverage of the Beijing region, the River Delta region and the Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macau Greater Bay Area as well as cities in other regions. Second, innovative credit policies that the character of [indiscernible]. We've broken through the traditional credit evaluation model and develop differentiated credit products for different life cycle such as growth and mature on innovation and growth attributes and [indiscernible] Number [indiscernible] office branch to build a full range from talent to enterprises from credit to equity insurance and wealth management service system. Also, we have formulated online financial product and services. We -- for example, the head office launched a convenient online product loan for small and medium micro tech enterprises.

Recently, they innovatively promoted the R&D loan in Zhjian, Shanghai and other places, the loan serving AI company essential, which are widely welcomed by the market. In the first half of this year, the number of companies with loans in the bank exceeded 34,000 ranking among the best in the industry. Fourth, an integrated tech innovation ecosystem guided by the financial needs of tech companies. We focus on leveraging internal and external synergy and build an innovation service ecosystem.

Externally, we collaborated with government department, research institute, venture capital firm to establish an innovation alliance and establish a mechanism for mutual learning we upgraded AC technology, financial service solution and implemented the deployment of investing early, investing in more businesses, investing for the long term and investing in hard technology business intelligence digital platform to industrial financial service platform. This is our own for a modern industrial system in key areas and build an industrial client map. We integrate internal and external data from multiple dimensions, embedelligent evaluation models and providing dynamic monitor

Hong Kong Macau Great project [indiscernible] modern and are clearly invest and focus on investing, investing and investing for long term as Group has extensive channels and a large client base and it has obvious advantages in inclusive financing and technology finance investment and leverage the advantages to select industrial and recommend high-quality projects for technology companies in stages to provide capital and company early-stage technology companies with patient capital helping them go through growth cycles and provide integrated services, including equity investment loan and consulting to help them grow stronger during the business plan, ABC will continue to focus on technology finance impact strategy and focus on and also for the development of...

Thank you for the sharing of fines. My question is about the dividend distribution introduced that the cash dividend distribution percentage will increase to 31% from 30%, which reflects the importance of how to stabilize the dividend ratio in the future better reward investors.

And looking into the future, we will have more high-quality services, main business services provided. And secondly, the second thing we do is that we will have a long-term high-quality information exposure.

We believe this is very important for our relationship, our trusted relationship with the investors. And what we will do is, on the one hand, in terms of the main business information disclosure like the strategic and financial service information disclosure, we will strengthen the -- yes, we will strengthen what we do in expose more related information. And at the same time, we will have more diversified information disclosed and also to respond to the suggestions and the calls of our investors to answer to the market.

At the same time, the Agricultural Bank of China will have a sustainable way of development and to safeguard the sustainable value of our investors. And since the public listing of ABC of 2021, there has been 12% and 11% of the A share and H share stock of return for investors of ABC. And in 2023, the number have reached 34% and 36%. So that is the number, the statistics. And at the same time, we have always paid back our investors with high level of dividend. We have remained the level of dividend above 30% and the whole dividend amount more than RMB 987.2 billion, and that is a stable and sustainable return for our investments. And we are also going to have more options like the intermediate profit distribution to its shareholders and other measures.

So in the future, we are going to have more diversified ways to maintain this high level of dividend return and the interest return to share the results of development with all of our investors. So we have had a very thorough discussion today. And due to time limits, we will have the floor open to the last question. Please give the microphone to this, madam.

First of all, thank you, directors, for this very precious opportunity to be the last one to ask questions. I'm from CICC. I'm. We have noticed that in recent years, ABC is having very good business performance and creating a lot of dividends and return for the shareholders. So behind such great results, there must have been a lot of strategic planning and very efficient implementation of strategies. So here, I would like to ask what will be the key areas of development for ABC in the 15th Five-Year plan of China's economy?

[Interpreted]

Thank you for the question. I'm going to answer your question. Just as you have said, in the 14th Five-Year Plan, ABC has achieved a very great business performance results. And just just as you've said, this has a lot to do with the strategic planning of us at the beginning of the 14th 5-year plan period of China and also our precise implementation of this plan. So in the 15th 5-year plan period, we believe this is a very important period for our country's economy to have a solid foundation of economic development and high-quality and speed economic development.

So on this very important time point, we are going to follow the guideline and the policy of our Central body Committee and our central government and the ABC is also having our own 15th 5-year plan. We have already submitted that to our Board of Directors for the review. And during the 15th 5-year plan of ABC, according to our plan, we are going to implement the social idea with the new eras characteristics and also to serve the people and to serve the real economy and to have the reform and innovation as our main driving force and to follow the guidance of our party and to strictly follow the policies. And our goal is to serve the agriculture, rural area and rural residents and to serve the people and to be a bank of inclusive financial services. And in this way for China to improve its national capacity with financial development, we want to make our own contribution in this new chapter.

So there will be some measures taken. First of all, we will put the leadership of our party the political ideas at the center of our development. The leadership of the CPC will be implemented into all steps of our company and our bank's development and management. The ideas and ideologies will be our tools for high-quality management of our bank. And also anticorruption work is very important for our bank. We are going to follow the anticorruption measures taken by our party. And at the same time, we are going to stick to our main business.

We will always have this goal of being the leading bank in rural revitalization. And we will put the service of the agriculture rural residents rural area in the core of our businesses and to make our own contribution for the modernization of agriculture and rural areas. We will improve the quality of the daily inclusive financial services for agriculture and rural area. And also, we will have more innovative mechanism for the agriculture and the rural area and also promote the country-level business development steadily and at the same time, we are going to be led by the new ideas and patterns of development. And we are going to pay special attention to the key areas and the weak areas and to provide them with enough financial support.

We are going to improve the 6 network building and to provide strategic support for the strategic industries. And we are going to give priorities to the 5 main chapters of financial development, and we are going to improve the international development of financial service sector and high-quality development of financial sector. And in addition, we hope our financial service can help our people. We want to serve the people and we hope that because we have the advantage with the widest coverage of customers, and we want to make use of that advantage to benefit the people and to improve the livelihood of the people and the welfare, social welfare of the people and to provide more diversified financial services to different groups of customers to introduce more diversified financial services and products to every household and to improve the life quality of Chinese people.

And fifthly, we want to build this intelligent bank, smart bank for a future high-quality development of our financial services. We will integrate the AI and other technologies into our existing business and to create a new ecosystem, which human efforts and machine efforts and AI efforts can be coordinated for our digital transformation. And we will have the AI to lead the change in paradigm of our digital finance and to create new competitive advantages for us in the new era.

And sixthly, we will stick to the path of stable development. We will always put the risk control as the main topic of our financial services, put it at the core and to create a comprehensive system to innovate the tools and measures to improve our ways for long-term and-looking risk control measures. And we need to improve our new ways of risk control in this new era of technology because new high security level is very important for high-quality development. And that's our plan. And for the next step, we are going to implement all the plans to put all things into solid work to change -- to turn the blue trend into a real scary and to make our own contribution for the 15th Five-Year plan of our country. And that's my answer.

[Interpreted]

Thank you very much, Mr. Wang, for the answer. And ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for your participation in this 2026 interim results announcement of Agricultural Bank of China. And I also want to thank all the investors, analysts and journalists for your long-term attention to ABC's development. And I also want to thank the director team. Thank you for -- under the guidance of Mr. Wang. Thank you for sharing with us your experience. So in the future, if you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to ask our team and the department for further information. And that's the end for today's meeting and today's announcement. Thank you very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. I'm the President of ABC. Welcome to the annual results announcement of ABC. It's a great pleasure to meet with the friends, online, offline investors and analysts and friends from the media. I'd like to take this opportunity to express my appreciation for your support, trust and interest in the development of ABC.

With that, I'd like to present to you the management of ABC.

Mr. Lin Li, [indiscernible] Vice President of ABC and Mr. [indiscernible] Vice President of ABC and the Board Secretary, Mr. [indiscernible]. And some of the senior management are participating from a meeting online. With that, I'd like to present to you the business performance, business strategies and the outlook for 2026 of ABC.

In terms of the business highlights, which you are interested in, 2025 is the last year of the 14th 5-year plan.

It is a year for the new progress for ABC. In the past year, we guided by the thought on socialism with the Chinese characteristics and strengthen overall leadership of third party and implement the relevant decisions, arrangement of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council, deeply practiced the political and people-oriented nature of financial work and firmly grab main line of preventing risks, promoting high-quality.

Development, made overall efforts in our aspects, providing more powerful and effective service to the real economy, achieving steady progress in business, achieving steady progress in business operations with the high effective service, main characteristics of our business, our steady improvement and steady progress in the business operations.

First, stable profits, ABC's net profit and operating income continue to maintain a double-digit growth, reaching RMB 292 billion and RMB 725 billion, respectively, a growth rate of 3.3% and 2.1%, respectively.

Compared to first -- 3 quarters, growth rates increased by 2 bps and 0.1 points, respectively. Net NIM, 1.28% among topping the peers and average return on total assets, 0.63%. Weighted average return on net assets at 10.16% with a capital adequacy ratio of 17.39% with excellence of our business.

Total assets reached RMB 48.8 trillion with a growth rate of 12.8%. New loans and financial investment in local foreign currencies totaled RMB 4.7 trillion. In sensitive of economy is a leading industry and the loan growth rate was 8.9% liability, business continued to maintain a good development with a deposit growth rate of 7.7%.

An average daily increase in RMB deposits ranked first among the comparable peers. Daily deposits is consistently improving and duration of local foreign currency deposits in the end of last year was 0.58%, best among the comparable peers.

We are the only bank to achieve a positive growth in RMB loans for 7 consecutive years with high-quality loans. NPL ratio of domestic banks declined for 5 consecutive years and further decreased by 3 basis points in 2025, remains a relatively low level of 1.7% -- 1.27% industry. And provision -- the special mention loan ratio, 1.39% and overdue loan ratio 1.25%.

The difference between the NPL and overdue loan ratio was registered a negative growth and which was also the only bank in comparable peers with exhibited a loan ratio lower than the nonperforming loan ratios. ABC loan balance is continued to above RMB 1 trillion, an increase of RMB 39.6 billion over the previous year.

Provision coverage ratio was 292.5% with both indicators of the balance of loan provision and provision coverage ratio ranked among the first among the comparable peers. The fourth return is very high. Since its listing in 2010, considering the comprehensive return of stock price increase and the dividend, the annualized average returns of investors in A shares and H shares reached 12% and 10%, respectively. In the next 3 years, that is from 2023 to 2025, and it reached to 48% and 41%, respectively.

In terms of dividends, the Board of Directors proposed a distribution in final dividend for 2025 with a rate of RMB 1.3 per share and tax included. Inclusive together with the dividend already distributed in the range the total dividend of the whole year amounts to HKD 2.495 per share and RMB [indiscernible] per share tax included.

Dividend payout ratio was 30%. We'll have a more resilient and more sustainable development. Last year, we did the work in the last following 5 aspects. First, we stick to our main businesses that is providing service for the agriculture, that is agricultural rural areas and farmers.

We consolidated the foundation for business development and improve the quality and efficiency of providing service rural-related areas and build a differentiated competitive advantages and the loans from the country level regions balance reached RMB 1 trillion for 4 consecutive years and the balance reached RMB 10.9 trillion, and the balance accounted for more than 40% of the total loans.

And the balance in the county levels has doubled during the 14th 5-year plan period. And deposit balance was 14.3 trillion, an increase of RMB 1.23 trillion over the end of the previous year and contributed more than [indiscernible] to the increase of deposits of the whole bank.

Specifically, our channels for serving clients have been further improved among the 22,800 branches of the bank, 56% are located in county-level cities and rural towns or townships. ABC is only a large state-owned bank with a full coverage of county-level outlets. In recent years, we have further shifted the focus of our service to the grassroots levels existing the reach of our services continuously improving, completing them. And we have [indiscernible] 61 services, namely our physical outlets, self-service machines, mobile banking, rural service stations, mobile service, [indiscernible] and remote banks to form them into one, which continuously enhance our service capabilities to provide service to every villages and household.

And last year, we moved another 179 outlets to townships built 1,742 rural service stations enrich our product shelves. And also, we have also made great efforts to build a product and service system to 10 major financial areas, including green finance and targeted property, alleviation finance, innovated and promoted inclusive products such as agric park loans, technology loans and professional farmer loans specifically serving the differentiated diversified financing needs of agricultural areas and farmers.

And we can develop -- we have developed 43 products across all industries and 208 regional characteristic products and dedicated products to cover key areas of rural revitalization. By leveraging technological means, we have continuously optimized the loan application process for farmers, actively promoting on-site and remote work mode, further enhancing the convenience and accessibility of rural financial services with the balance of the reaching RMB 1.84 trillion.

Fourfold increase during the 14th 5-year plan period. And grain and important agricultural products have been increased. Long industries [indiscernible] road development and related fields grew by 20.3%, 19.5% and 9.6%, respectively, and 832 property stricten counties and 160 key counties for rural revitalization have seen faster loan growth than the average growth rate of the entire bank.

Second, we sticked to the essence of finance and building new advantages in business development by implementing national strategies and serving the rural economy. We insist on serving the real economy as our fundamental purpose sees the trend of new and old driving forces transformation and industrial upgrading, continues to optimize allocation of financial resources while serving the high-quality development of the rural economy also strive to promote our own high-quality development. In 2025, the loan balance of ABC reached RMB 27.13 trillion, an increase of RMB 2.23 trillion over the end of the previous year.

Among them, personal loans, inclusive loans and private enterprise loans took the lead exceeding RMB 9 trillion, RMB 4 trillion and RMB 7 trillion, respectively. Our financial investment was RMB 16.3 trillion, an increase of RMB 2.47 trillion over the previous year. We made every effort to serve the stable investment and consumption with the supporting of financing were too heavy, that is implementation of national strategy and the key areas in ensuring national strategy projects.

We also are going in the front and the projects are ranked among the best in the comparable industry, increase of growth rate of the consumer loans were also ahead of the peers. Personal consumption loans, including credit cards, have a growth rate of 9% and the balance reached RMB 1.45 trillion. We continue to strive the Five Priorities of finance, promote more financial resources, invest in the productivity, green development, inclusive finance and provide loans to the SMEs.

Other key areas was strength in the key areas and weak claims. The balance of the technology finance loan, green finance loan, inclusive finance loan reached RMB 4.7 trillion, RMB 5.93 trillion, RMB 4.35 trillion, respectively, growth rate of 20.1%, 18.7% and 20.9%, respectively.

A number of inclusive known clients ranked the first among comparable peers. Total supply of inclusive finance is the largest with the widest service coverage, further consolidating the leading bank's position with the strongest sustainable development capability. In the field of pension finance, the number of physical and electronic social security card users ranked first among peers and the number of clients and the amount of individual pension service are also among the best in the comparable peers.

The loan with the pension industry reached RMB 23.16 billion and were 108.5%. We actively serve higher level of opening up, introduce a work plan to stabilize foreign trade and investment active supports the cross-border use of RMB and helps to diversify the trade markets and integrate domestic and foreign trade.

Third is to focus and put the client first, expand the new space for business development while enhancing client service capabilities. Clients are the foundation of our bank. We always take client development as a fundamental and strategic task. We will press ahead with the project to expand the client base, improve service for corporate clients with a group and tiered management personal loans, improve the service model driven by digital plus model and continuously enhance refined and comprehensive client service.

Client base has been expanding, reaching 896 million for personal clients and remaining the largest in the industry. Nonbanking -- nonbank financial assets on AUM for personal clients amounted to RMB 24.7 trillion, an increase of RMB 2.4 trillion and end of previous year with 13.29 million corporate clients, an increase of 1.16 million clients from the end of previous year and ranked among the top in the peers.

We had 609 million personal mobile banking clients with over 276 million monthly active users and over 292 million monthly active users. Our mobile devices maintained industry-leading growth rates on both metrics. The quality and efficiency of customer service continue to improve with a focus on better meeting customers' financial needs.

We continuously enrich and expand our product offerings and portfolios in areas such as deposit credit, wealth management, strengthen service, synergy between commercial banks and investment banks and domestic foreign currencies, financial and nonfinancial service and advancing rural service project, we have been steadfast in promoting customers' rights and interest, making our customer service more diverse and personalized.

We have strengthened our professional service capabilities. We have improved our employee training system, provided classified professional training to strengthen the team on wealth management and providing solid support for client service.

Our total number of wealth management advisers have reached 119,000 increase of 6,000 from the end of last year. Fourth, we have deepened the reforming and innovation by deeply integrating business technology data. We have created a new impetus for business development. We have actively embraced the new round of technological revolution, deeply advanced construction and smart banks, intensified data empowerment and AI applications striving to transform technological innovation, a key variable into the greatest increment for high-quality development, making the application base for technological innovation more solid, accelerating the building of AI plus capability systems such as data technology, security, providing strong support for the large-scale and inclusive application of AI, making the approach of digital operations more mature, effective reducing the burden and workload empowering grassroots outlets become more significant.

First, strengthen bottom line thinking and thickening and strengthen the safety cushion and buffer for business development. We also take risk management and control as our longstop task and continuously enhance professional capability in building risk management serve the ballast for maintaining financial stability.

We continue to improve the comprehensive risk management system, strengthen forward-looking risk identification and enhanced risk disposal response in key areas and consolidating foundation of internal control and compliance management. And third, an outlook for 2026. We have confidence from 2 sources or aspects. First, the economic performance -- macroeconomic performance is stable and growing, creating a favorable macro environment for the development of ABC.

The outline of our 15th Five-Year Plan have provided a guideline for our development. And in China's economy is has a solid foundation with many advantages and a strong resilience and long-term positive support conditions and basic trends with great potential have not changed. With the implementation of the supporting measures of the 15th Five-Year plan are gradually implemented, the economic growth rate will continue to maintain within a high reasonable rate. And we will continue to have the strong foundation.

This has led a solid foundation for us to make further breakthroughs. Over the past 5 years, we have thoroughly studied and implemented General Secretary Xi Jinping's important expositions on the financial work, and we have actively pursued this path of financial development with Chinese characteristics. And we have also expanded our product and service quality and also optimized our team building capacities and also cemented our risk control efforts.

This has given us a very good starting point. Dear friends, ABC's defining feature is agriculture. This year marks our 75th anniversary. During the past 75 years of ups and downs, we have always been resonating with our national strategy and also standing in unity with billions of customers and sharing value with broad investors.

2026 is the first year of the 15th plan. And the new era calls for new responsibilities and also the new journey requires new actions. ABC will continue to strengthen our party leadership and uphold a correct view of achievements. We will continue to lay a solid foundation and contribute to the starting chapter of the 15th Five-Year plan and create more value for shareholders, customers and investors in all sectors of society.

Next, let's head into the Q&A session. I would like to invite the Secretary of BOD, Ms. Liu to be the moderator.

Now the first question, please, on site. lady on my left, first row, please.

I'm from Xinhua News Agency. After hearing the introduction, we can see that even though the overall external environment has been quite complicated, but ABC has reaped very good operating outcome and especially in the capital market, I'm just wondering what is the outlook of ABC in next year, such as in NIM and also in the net profit? What are the main driving forces?

Well, I will take that question. I have just shared with you in 2025, even though we have a very complex business environment, our revenue growth has remained resilient and also operating income has maintained positive growth for 2 years running.

Our net profit has also been maintaining positive growth as well. And also, it is now on an upward trajectory for better growth. If we look this over the long term, the performance or the financial performance of ABC is quite good and also remarkable. Our net profit growth has been leading the industry for 6 years and operating income has also been leading among our peers, creating new historical highs. And this has shown the growth and the bonus of the market.

And we believe that the 15th Five-Year plan has given us even more confidence. I have just shared with you that the senior management is quite confident about better operating performance in 2026. So from the performance of the first 2 months of 2026, where operating income or overall operations have maintained stable growth and also positive trend. Our physical loans increased by RMB 1.1 trillion, achieving a year-on-year growth and NIM has -- or say net interest income has also turned positive year-on-year, which is an inflection point in the first quarter.

This has further confirmed that our operating income will continue to be put on an upward trend, laying a solid foundation for the profitability across the entire bank. In the next phase, we will keep our strategic focus while providing better financial services. We'll continue to coordinate our pricing strategies while deepening our efforts to drive down cost and improve efficiency and continue the current solid momentum, and we will focus on the following 3 aspects. First of all, we will continue to drive the positive growth of net interest income, and we also strengthen our efforts to make sure that we have a positive growth in net interest income.

In terms of scale, we will continue to issue more loans and also contribute to the real economy, and we will also optimize the structure of our assets and also strengthen refined management and improve the marginal returns of the assets. We will continue to consolidate our customer base and flexibly arrange our next efforts in driving down cost of deposits. And secondly, we'll continue to expand the growth space of net interest income.

We will leverage the consumption policies and try our best to satisfy the diverse demands of our customers and seize the opportunities of the capital market and amplify the service supply for wealth management products. On the other hand, we will also strengthen our analysis of the market and flexibly determine on our trading or transaction strategies as well as the allocation of different categories of assets.

And thirdly, we will better control risks and cost to better coordinate development and security and ensure that we put credit risks under control and try our best to drive down risks and cost.

We will also strengthen our intensive and refined management model to reduce nonessential expenses. Anyway, we will try to achieve higher profits at better cost. So we are fully confident about the performance in 2026. So much from me.

Thank you so much, President Wang. Next question, please, on the right, please.

Thank you so much senior management members. I would like to ask a question about loans. In 2025, the credit loans has increased pretty fast. And in retail and country level loans, we have seen very good growth. Could you walk us through the plans or, say, the growth target for credit loans in 2026? And what are the key areas that you will focus on?

I will continue to take your question. In 2025, we have actively implemented important major strategies at the national level. We have aligned ourselves with demands of the real economy and the overall volume of loans has shown better structure and also bigger volume. In terms of the total amount, I've shared with you that we have a total of RMB 2.23 trillion newly added loans. And in terms of structure, we have invested more in agriculture-related loans as well as rural revitalization services.

And we have also injected greater momentum into 5 priorities and improving quality and efficiency. This year is the starting year of the 15th Five-Year plan. And in the government work report, we have a GDP growth target of 4.5% to 5%. And we also want to build a strong domestic market to achieve technological self-reliance and also [indiscernible].

There are a series of supporting projects as well as measures for rural revitalization. I believe that these are opportunities for commercial banks in credit placement. We will maintain our current intensity of credit to support the real economy and the average growth rate would be roughly the same as last year in the first 2 months of 2026, where economy is now rebounding. So we will seize the opportunity to focus on our national major strategies and credit deployment or credit placement has also achieved a very good start.

By the end of February, our bank-wide physical loan growth has achieved year-on-year positive growth. And also, this is a sign of good momentum for sure. Our green technology where agriculture-related loans have registered positive growth, maintaining at average levels for comparable peers.

And -- in the future, we will continue to highlight the agriculture and rural areas and also farmers-related fields. We will focus on improving the large area grain yield improvement and also ensure that we produce new quality productive forces and strengthen financial services for links across the whole [indiscernible] field chain, focus on specialty industry and key sectors and also big customers and important projects.

We will make it bigger and better, especially in financial services, such as the issuance of farmer loans to ensure that we have stable growth in loans in 2026. And secondly, we will focus on 2 different areas such as domestic demand. We will continue to lend more support to major projects on transportation and energy, ensure that we have supporting financing services for a new round of policy, financial tools or instruments.

We will also align our efforts with traditional consumption models and also emerging new consumption models such as green consumption. And we will implement the physical policies to maintain a leading growth momentum for consumer loans. And thirdly, we will support the construction of a modern industrial system such as we will sort out the customer list and then cultivate new quality productive forces, step up or speed up our technological innovation to support or contribute to emerging industries development.

We will also focus on industry green transformation, green development, low carbon and green transition of energy and other key sectors. This will mean that we will improve the credit placement in green sectors and also the proportion of green loans.

And fourthly, we will focus on inclusive SME loans and establish a work coordination mechanism. We'll continue to increase the support for SMEs and coordinate development and security, consolidate our leading advantages in inclusive finance and make sure that we cater to the demands of our residents in education, health care and so many others.

Thank you so much, President Wang. Next, I would like to ask for the gentleman on the right, the lady on the right for a question.

I know that commercial banks are under pressure, but ABC has maintained very stable asset quality. What measures have you taken in order to manage and prevent risks? And I would like to know about the NPL formation rate as well as your key focus in both retail and also corporate sectors.

So Vice President Lin, please take the question.

Thank you for that question. From the perspective of a commercial bank, in the future 2 to 3 years, I think that the watershed should lie in the ability of risk management because the products can be very homogeneous and also the services can also be quite similar.

And even AI models can be pretty much the same in the future, but there will be definitely differences between commercial banks in risk management and provision efforts. So that's why we think that we should do a good job in risk provision and management. For ABC, what did we do in that regard? Well, I think that it can be summarized in the following points.

Generally speaking, it can be summarized as really doing hard work and getting our feet on the ground. ABC has placed risk prevention and management as an internal theme of our financial work. And we have been building our strong foundation and also cementing the current base for risk management.

We have been quite prudent in our operations. We think that we can't say that the commercial banks are too careful or too much careful in their operations. And also, firstly, we have highlighted the role of quality and efficiency. And fourthly, we have to be problem oriented. And fifthly, we have to uphold our bottom lines.

By integrated risk management and control and also with a forward-looking reflection capabilities, we can proactively control our risks and ensure good asset quality overall. And just now President Wang has shared with us the overall business or the overall situation at ABC.

In 2025, our NPL ratio stood at 1.27%, down by 0.03% compared with the end of last year. The NPL ratio for 5 years running has been on a downward trend.

Well, the special mention loan ratio was 1.39%, down by 1 bp from the beginning of the year. Overdue loan ratio, 1.25%, maintained the lowest among the comparable peers. And the difference between the NPL and overdue loan was always at negative. And also, we our credit balance of RMB 1.057 trillion, and we believe ABC is the only bank with a credit balance exceeding RMB 1 trillion. And from a prudent perspective, our credit provision increased by RMB 39.6 billion. The provision for loan loss ratio reached 292.55%, maintaining ABC at a strong risk resilient position.

And in terms of the nonperforming loan formation, the formation ratio of corporate loans decreased compared to last year and the NPL ratio of inclusive retail loans has increased, compared to last year.

NPL ratio of the whole bank for the whole year was 0.89%. We do believe the asset quality is well under control and similar of last year. And also the formation ratio of NPL has been maintained below 1%, which is relatively quite low. For the loans for the SMEs balance reached RMB 3.93 trillion, an increase of RMB 700 billion from the year beginning and NPL formation ratio, 1.54%.

For the inclusive finance or the credit cards, including rural households, which is at the key of our risk control. So if we also incorporate them, our -- the balance of our retail loan balance loan was RMB 9.26 trillion, an increase of RMB 448.5 billion from the year beginning with NPL ratio of [indiscernible].

The main indicators of inclusive retail loans maintain leading position among the peers. It is worth notable that credit card business in terms of serving consumption, boosting development and advancing quality and quantity has performed quite well.

And also our credit card loan incremental increase and asset quality are the best among our peers. And also, we apply the innovation and also the systematic thinking and relative philosophies to build a new management measures for the credit businesses and also further build a comprehensive risk management system for the inclusive retail business, we have done in the following 6 aspects for inclusive retail business.

The first one is to build a stratified marketing system and also to promote or roll out the new business models and also have the top-level design of the head office from the provincial branch, and we have the sandbox operation at the city level branches, and we have the template of marketing for our outlets and branches focus on local conditions, industrial clusters and professional markets and also have a county-specific system.

And also we draw a financial ecosystem map or road map adapting to the needs of different areas, adapting to the local conditions and also the formulating credit plans. We screen high-quality customers, and we have SOP so as to change the [indiscernible] , inefficient and a passive customer acquisition model.

And we built an active batch based and a source customer acquisition business development model. And second, we adhere to the idea of minimization or focus on the [indiscernible] long accounts and also match the credit line with the customers' demands and also expand our business while also have system control so as to enhance our serviceability or quality to the small- and medium-sized customers to enhance the accessibility and coverage of our financial service.

While at the same time, we give up using a simple model to measure or calculate the credit line so as to put our risk within our risk tolerance. And we take the households at our center or as a priority and also build a new vision of management. We have a unified credit approval and also credit management -- to be more specific, for the same family business for the SME legal persons and business owners and the relatives or friends or in the personal or individual business, consumption and credit card businesses are putting under the same umbrella of management.

We have a cross-line and cross-product coordination so as to effectively prevent the under-standard eligibility of the customers for certain products because for some of the products, we have the differentiated threshold for the eligibility of the customers.

So we also prevent the overlap of the credit granting, but also prevent the risk of excessive credit granting. Fourth, we integrated online and offline businesses. We leverage on the models or the digital tools, but we are not over relying on the digital tools.

We insist on the principle of enhancing people's awareness, understanding and also have on the spot investigations for due diligence, while at the same time, we enhance businesses, tax, credit history, private fund as well as other third-party data to do the customer or KYC business. We have a cross check of the authenticity of our customers, so as to ensure that the fund they use is for the real purpose for business.

And we are not just following the trend. We also used open cloud to process and analyze the data in an automized way and to generate the KYC report so as to make our credit approval and more efficient and also have a process and procedure constraints and build a business mechanism.

What is key here is to separate the approval from the credit granting. And also we separate the roles because impressive for some of the inclusive retail loan granting, the approval and the lending are put together.

But in our practice, we insist for the online SME inclusive loan, we separate the amount of the business and also we separate the roles in the -- between the approval and the loan or disbursement, so as to form checks and balances in the process of credit granting and we also make up for the shortcomings of the decisions for the models.

And also, we prevent the one people have to save for everything. And we say no to any form of intermediary person participating in the marketing or doing the -- handling the business. If some of the illegal or inappropriate intermediaries or agencies participate in that they will bring a lot of shock to the business of the bank.

Sixth, we empower on the technology and also to enhance our risk management capabilities empowered by technologies, meaning on the model process identification and system real-time early warning, we use UCR recognition and GPS positioning and also cash flow clearing and AI intelligence and other technologies to do the improved ability of anti-fraud and -- and also rely on the big data or large language model, we focus on new loans, professional debtors or the intermediary loan companions and other risk characteristics, consistently optimizing the risk control model and during -- before, during and after the lending to improve the accuracy of our early alerting, so as to ensure the stability of our asset quality, and we will further enhance our risk management and mitigation in a more systematic way in inclusive retail business.

Moving forward, we firmly establish appropriate attitude to our performance and do our own job well for the right purpose. We will stick to a prudent and steady risk appetite and also put the risk prevention and management as a priority.

It is very promising that asset quality will be -- continue to be stable and maintain a relatively leading position among our peers. Why we are so confident? First, we have a more profound and comprehensive full-fledged risk management control system, to be more specific, we'll have credit management.

We have online/offline coordination and separate the credit approval and credit branding business. And we also have a unified credit management and also to enhance accountability, we use the smart tools and to have a unified monitoring and supervising.

In Chongqing, ACB set up a head office level digital risk management center for the purpose of enhance our monitoring of the early warning identification and also early check and dispose of the credit risk of inclusive retail business and also to enhance our management overdue loans and enhance the disposal of NPAs and also enhance the notification of the overdue or when the loans come due.

Here, we enhanced the smart disposal platform 2.0 version and also to enhance the dispatched transfer or disposal of NPA, enhance the efficiency of the diversified NPA disposal channels.

Please rest assured, the inclusive retail loan are small, scattered or there are a lot of amount of them, but we will further make a health check so as to clarify and also have an order well-organized management of this type of business. And also for the risk management of the key areas that has been further improved in terms of efficiency.

In terms of the real estate loan by the end of -- as at the end of 2025, NPL ratio in the industry remain unchanged from the previous year. And newly NPL has been decreased year-on-year. We'll continue to adhere to a household-specific policy and approach, project-specific plan and step up risk control for large clients focus on key links such as funds, assets, equity strictly managing the account presale funds and separating the operation from project funds.

And we'll use the 16 financial policies for rules and whitelist loan continuation. And also, we will enhance or we will provide our credit support for the high-quality or better housing projects and also will enhance the credit measures. We will not expand our business or lendings in this area in a blend way and also use the policies to replace the implicit debts.

And also we have to optimize the structure of the existing debt to lower down our risk exposure and also have a market-oriented rule-based and appropriate finance approach to increase our financing in these areas so as to safeguard the bottom line of not increasing the implicit debt.

And also, we will enhance our structures in a preventive way that is very important. And also, we will reduce the low-quality or inefficient customers, but at the same time, support the building of the modernized industrial system. We'll focus on the structural risks, and we will take preemptive measures for the overcapacity. We will not do the evolution so as to ensure the credit quality.

The next question, please.

From Economic Daily. My question about wealth management, the personal customer is around RMB 896 million, which is leading among the peers and over the several -- past several years, customers have high demands on wealth management with the fluctuations in the capital fluctuation and also people have a demand of the capital allocation. As Mr. Wang said, ABC rolled out a lot of innovative measures in wealth management. Could you please elaborate more on the innovative measures on wealth management? And what are the plans moving forward.

Thank you for the question. Mr. Lin, please.

Thank you for the question. So as an entity or a bond in connecting people's saving or household savings to the circulation of economy, there is a lot of room for us to -- or potential for us to tap into in wealth management. This is an important measure to serve to boost China's strength in finance.

Wealth management is an important part for the modern financial system. By developing strengthen wealth management will help to cultivate potential capital increase the direct financing and also to enhance the efficiency and quality of the financial service to the real economy and the high-quality development. It also projected for people's well-being.

Next, it can also improve the residence income. Wealth management can expand their income generation channels and it can also get the public to participate more broadly in the capital market and then share in the fruits of economic development. And thirdly, it is an intrinsic requirement for high quality development of commercial banks, wealth management features light capital, stable returns, and sustainability.

It is an important path for commercial banks to transition from scale expansion to value creation.

ABC has been people oriented in recent years, and we placed wealth management business development as a very important priority, and we have deepened our strategy for integrated and 2-wing approach of retail development.

And basically, it's all about customer development. So the 2-wing refers to wealth management and digital transformation or transition. And with our forward-looking layout, we have a driven financial development system to cement the development for operating income.

First of all, we have upheld value-driven approach and also a people-oriented model. The nature of our management approach is to have an asset allocation with customer at the center. We want to create value and also provide allocation service strategies. We hope that we want to strive to become a reliable planner or say, family, financial adviser for our clients.

And another one is comprehensive service capability. By the end of 2025, the personal financial assets across the entire bank has reached RMB 24.7 trillion. During the 14th Five-Year plan period, the number has increased by nearly RMB 10 trillion, ranking ourselves at the forefront of the industry. If we look at the latest figures, we can see that is now exceeding RMB 25.4 trillion.

In terms of assets and liabilities, ABC's personal asset, deposits and also personal loan scale, all ranked first in the industry. So we have the most deposits, loans and also the largest number of customers. So we should be a very big and preferred bank for a large number of customers.

And secondly, we have optimized the asset allocation of customers and integrate that with advancing 5 priorities. In that regard, we have created an agricultural pension financial service platform. And in ESG, we have made comprehensive breakthroughs crossing the RMB 100 billion threshold across different product lines.

And thirdly, we have achieved the breakthroughs on multiple fronts. In the past 5 years, we have seen that our LBM has currently reached RMB 3.65 trillion. And also during the 14th Five-Year period, the total customer volume has increased by nearly 2 trillion. So all of this has put us also at the forefront of the entire banking industry. The wealth management products in agriculture sector has also exceeded RMB 2.2 trillion, leading comparable peers. And more importantly, we have created over RMB 340 billion for investors.

We are also doing very best to satisfy our consumer demands and also insurance demands. In terms of premiums under agency, we have ranked the first among our peers. ABC Life Insurance and also other institutions under ABC, have all maintained a leading position among comparable peers. We have also adhered to a reform-driven progress approach.

Wealth management and resource integration and innovation have all followed a similar path. So we have 896 million individual customers and also 22,800 outlets, and we also have very big advantages in channels and customers. All of these have turned into the driving forces for ABC. First, we are dedicated to create a full spectrum of product portfolios to leverage the advantages of integrated operations.

We need to build a multifunctional portfolio or is a matrix that covers different diversified strategies, wealth management products such as trust funds, precious metal investments and more.

Secondly, we have upgraded the market open platform. We have to keep ourselves open to work with third-party institutions and improve our coordination and step-up management in scientific evaluation mechanisms, introduce quality resources from the market and satisfy diversified and customized demands of the customers. Thirdly, we have to provide full life cycle customer companionship at different stages.

We can ensure that we provide the right services such as wealth management and also family protection. Throughout the life cycle, we have to focus on developing comprehensive services for private businesses and in this way, we can also have cross-border wealth management and also so many other options to satisfy our customers diversified demands at multiple levels and also improve the accessibility and inclusiveness of our financial management services.

And thirdly, we have been persisting in organizational-driven efforts to forge wealth management service capabilities. We ensure that professionals under professional matters. A professional team can improve our efficiency and core competitiveness, which is in investment research and customer service.

First of all, we have created an open integrated professional research system. We have also strengthened the group's investments source integration mechanism built a multidisciplinary expert team and gained market insights. With the forward-looking and culture of study progress forward, we have implemented a very sound strategy for research, product introduction, marketing support and asset allocation, evaluation and final review.

And we have also been insisting in reasonable expectations and qualified interactions. We know that for our wealth management subsidiaries, we require them to have a realistic pricing expectations. We also worked with these joint venture financial companies, I would check their figures to ensure that we have the best delivery with our customers.

This can help us to ensure that we have a sound interaction between customer and the market. And on the other hand, we also need to ensure that our team is also customer oriented.

There are many things involved in ABC's business and our unique advantage is, of course, Sannong or agriculture-related services, but internally, we want to really interpret this service brand as improving results every day. It's not that we want to just do easy work or just shut out [indiscernible], but it is that we want to see improvements every day.

And next, we insist on precision management and strengthen our structural optimization and capacity development. We have -- already have professional compromising 119,000 customer manager and 6,000 wealth advisers.

We have also focused on the Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta and emerging potential areas. We have implemented differentiated strategies according to local conditions, build benchmark. And also in a total of 500 branches, we have done so in private banks. And also in some wealth management centers, we have definitely ensure that there is a tiered system for training to empower their training system and also service or professional service capabilities on the ground.

Sometimes we can go at bottom up. But other times, we think that top-down approach is also a very effective channel. Now we have 120,000 customer managers and 6,000 financial advisers. They should be working like seeds and they are providing services across the bank and serving our customers with their expertise.

And fourthly, we have to uphold a digitalization-driven approach and let wealth management be one of our growth engines. By using digital means and intelligent approaches, we can ensure that we have online and offline wealth management coordination efforts and a multidimensional service network. On one hand, we can improve our online and off-line service efficiency and these digital means can also empower our business, and we will continue to advance this all channel convenient and intelligent platform building.

And we will also make sure that we improve our capacity for all whether around the clock responsiveness. We are also actively using AI. We're applying in different scenarios. We have an employee, who is an AI model, and we will strengthen customer insights and intelligent layout as well as post investment companionship throughout the entire life cycle. From the performance in 2025, we can see the great wealth management income has reached RMB 35.7 billion and financial management fee income reaches RMB 251 billion, and we should say that this is a very big resilience market.

Basically, we have shown strong resilience in our business and also high market recognition and also, our business has maintained very stable growth with little fluctuations. And many of our joint venture wealth management companies have proper expectations for their products.

So we have talked so much about what work we have done and data and statistics. At the end of the day, high-quality development should be an all-hands-on-deck effort, which involves not only counter managers and also customer managers and wealth management managers and consultants and advisers and even sci-tech personnel.

Here, I would like to take this opportunity to -- on behalf of the senior management, express our heartfelt gratitude to our staff, who have weathered through many hardships and difficulties. And with their expertise and hard work, you have been fighting right at the forefront. Thank you so much for your diligence and hard work.

Okay. Thank you so much, Mr. Lin, for that very encouraging words. And next, I would like to invite next question.

[indiscernible], a financial analysist. I'm wondering about the situation in international business. We are now paying attention to business going global and also foreign trade, especially the growth structure and also the overall layout with a new market environment and also new customer demand, ABC -- how will ABC support key foreign trade enterprises to go global? And how will this contribute to your operating revenue and also your efforts for high-level opening up?

Thank you so much for that question. I would like to invite President Dr. Wang for a response.

Thank you so much for your interest in international business. ABC has been earnestly implementing the decisions and arrangements of the [ Party Central Committee]. And with that, we have been cementing the interplay between domestic and overseas market and optimize our cross-border financial comprehensive service system, the international settlement business volume has reached about USD 16,400, an increase of 8% year-on-year.

And the international trade financing business volume has increased by 30% year-on-year. The growth rate is still very impressive. So I think that, first of all, we have been helping or supporting businesses to go global.

In ABC, we have a presence in 18 countries and 21 overseas institutions, and we also have 1 joint venture bank. More than half of them are in building road countries and regions. So this has aligned with our efforts to help businesses to go global. In 2025, we have continued to ensure that the interplay between domestic and overseas institutions is well underway.

Our interplay business has reached USD 118 billion, an increase of 13%, and we have seen the financing business of BRI countries has reached USD 340 billion. We will continue to focus on Sannong areas and ensure that this leading business in this area can go global, and we will also lend support to international corporation projects. Across the year, the agricultural-related financing business has been handled for RMB 69 billion.

And second, we strengthened our product innovation to support the development of our new forms and new models of trade. It is safe to say that in recent years, the scale of the main players in the new forms and models for trade has been accelerated, becoming an important support for foreign trade.

And in response to the new characteristics of many players in new forms and new models of trade, ABC has empowered with technology to innovate cross-border payment products and many branches have completed the registration with SAFE and obtained the qualification for direct cross-border e-commerce collection. Scale of our direct cross-border e-commerce collection business ranks among the top in the -- among the peers.

And third, we have strengthened implementation of our regulation or regulatory policies, and we have enhanced the level of cross-border financial service, the reform of foreign exchange business development is an important measure for the institutional opening up of financial sector of China.

ABCs continuously promoted the reform and foreign exchange business development, expanded its scope business volume and a customer base accounted for a large proportion of the whole bank approaching to 40%.

The ability of promoting facilities and prevent risks has been further enhanced -- and also, we have supported the international use of RMB. Cross-border RMB settlement volume reached RMB 3.82 trillion, an increase of 8.7% year-on-year. ABC will combine the relevant arrangements for expanding high-level in the 15th Five-Year plan period continue to enhance our support for the real economy on foreign trade and build a closed loop for cross-border financial service.

And to serve the high-quality joint development of the Belt and Road Initiative, and we will optimize the linkage mechanism at home and abroad, enhanced supply of cross-border linked products and strengthen financial support for key overseas investment projects and introduce a special work plan to support the development of the new land and sea passage in the West.

We will also strengthen the service capability for settlement and exchange of small currencies with neighboring countries and we'll optimize the cross-border financial system service system, and support stable skill and optimal structure of foreign trade, improve the service mechanism for our customers' high-end certified enterprises and strengthen support for cross-border financial business and high-quality agricultural and rural entities continue to support foreign trade enterprise under the financing coordination mechanism for SMEs and carry out innovation and application cross-border e-commerce financing products, building diversified payment channels.

And third, strengthen the supply of cross-border financial services enhance the level of cross-border trade investment and financing. And we will further enrich the system of exchange rate risk management, products support SMEs expanding foreign trade market, and we will support the cross-border use of RMB in the rural economy will play a more active role. So we will also provide a strong support for high-quality development of the entire bank.

And from [indiscernible] Asset Management, I'm [indiscernible]. My question is about inclusive finance. In the presentation, you mentioned inclusive finance, inclusive finance as one of the Five Priorities of finance about China. It is also a highlight of the business performance of ABC. Looking forward to 2026, how ABC will maintain the good momentum in inclusive finance for sustainable development .

Thank you very much for the question. I'd like to invite Mr. Wang Dajun, Vice President of ABC to take this question.

Thank you very much for the question. Inclusive finance covering a lot of industries, covering a lot of households. One of the Five Priorities of finance of China is also an important aspect of practicing or maintaining the political nature and people oriented nature of the financial work.

By 2025, ABC has thoroughly implemented decisions, arrangements of the CPC Central Committee and the central government, deepened coordination mechanisms for supporting the financing of SMEs and also enhance the ability of our inclusive financial service in a comprehensive way.

We have promoted the increase of expansion and improvement of our inclusive finance. And we also achieved high-quality development and the quality and efficiency of providing inclusive financial service, mainly reflected on 3 aspects.

First, we are -- we have the largest supply of inclusive credit supply. As at the end of 2025, the balance of inclusive finance loan registered RMB 4.35 trillion increase. And also, we have -- compared with the beginning of this year, the inclusive finance loan to SME RMB 3.93 trillion.

And also this year, we reached or exceeded RMB 4 trillion. The balance of -- the balance and also increase of inclusive finance loan are the first among the peers. And also, we have the widest customer service coverage -- as at the end of 2025, ABC's inclusive SME customer with the loan from the bank, we have RMB 5.24 million, an increase of [indiscernible] from the year beginning.

The total number and increase of the customers has been the first among the peers for 3 consecutive years. So we are providing the truly inclusive finance service.

Third, we excel in sustainable development capabilities, and we shifted from the digitalization. We are leading among the peers to do so. The asset quality of inclusive finance loans are also leading among the peers. The evaluation from the regulators leading among the peers.

For 2026, as in the first year of the 15th Five-Year plan period, we will work on the following 3 fronts so as to ensure the inclusive finance business to maintain our good business momentum. To be more specific, first, we will make a good use of the policy tools of the country.

In the beginning of this year, relevant ministries of China rolled out the one package policy to support the coordination between fiscal and monetary finance, in particular, the fiscal subsidy for the SMEs and also the private investment guarantee plan that has brought new opportunities for the inclusive finance development.

We will enhance the cooperation between the banks and governments, between the banks and the guarantee agencies, focus on new policy tools, optimize our business process and rolled out featured products and offers so as to lower down the cost of financing our SMEs and increase the convenience, so as to transform the policy benefits into the growth drivers for inclusive finance.

Second, we'll make a good use of the institutions and mechanisms. ABC will continue to give our role of the 3 Sannong or the rural business departments and inclusive finance department and taking advantage of the dual-wheel drive organized structure.

It is -- we are the only bank that has such kind of dual-wheel drive that is the cooperation between the inclusive finance department and the rural business department.

And we will continue to leverage our advantages across urban rural areas with a large number of branches, outlets and extensive outlets coverages at the county level cities. And also, that is also the uniqueness or the feature of ABC. We will continue to demonstrate or the mechanism advantage that provide us with the willingness, ability and also expertise and also the courage of provide credit service to rural areas or related businesses. And also, we will promote digitalization in our inclusive finance.

We have the iteration upgrading and further enrich and improve our -- the Huinong or agricultural bank E-Loan platform and also build [indiscernible] outlets and the inclusive finance E-Loan to build an ecosystem on inclusive finance and also roll out AI intelligent credit-related business and also consistently improve the digital risk control system.

And ABC on [indiscernible] is for this purpose. And also, we will solve with the problems of the asymmetric information in inclusive finance and also for the -- further enhance our risk control and management, provide a high-quality service with a lower cost.

And in 2026, ABC will continue to adhere to the general key of seeking progress for maintaining stability and coordinate risk prevention development and to serve people's well-being focused on major strategies, key areas, weakness, so as to ensure the high-quality development of inclusive finance business. I'll stop here.

Next question, please.

I'm [indiscernible] from the The 21st Century Business News, serving the rural revitalization is the positioning of ABC and also that is what ABC is good at, how ABC will enhance your competitive edge in providing service to the county level areas.

Thank you very much for the question. Yes, provide rural revitalization is our main business, and it is also our highlights. And by the same time, it is a key focus area in our strategic development. In the past year, we stick to our main business and also to seize opportunity of the integrated development of the urban and rural areas provide financial supply or credit supply and also enhance our the quality and efficiency of providing service to the agricultural areas and country economy.

And also in the several aspects, first, with the contribution of county level for our average daily deposit and loan increment has been exceeded RMB 1 trillion. Proportion of increase increased by the 10.5% and 1.4 percentage points, respectively, compared with the previously with this better structure, balance of household loan exceeded RMB 1.8 trillion with an increase of RMB 337.7 billion or 22.4% and loans for key areas, green production rural industries, the growth rate of loans in these key areas is higher than the growth rate of all loans. Third, better quality and better efficiency. NPL ratio in county level regions was very low with stable asset quality moving forward.

We will have the document from the 15th Five-Year plan and there are systematic arrangement for the rural revitalization by aligning our development to the national strategy.

We rolled out 2026, 2 consolidations and 2 insurance of providing service to rural-related businesses. One is to consolidate the proportion of the county level loan in our overall loan portfolio and also consolidate our advantage of providing service to the county levels.

And also we ensure that we'll maintain the same intensity and also the over stable asset quality. In the new year, our 2026 will continue to enhance the policy resource investment, enhance our ability of providing financial service.

To be more specific, we'll do a good job well in the following 5 aspects. The first, we will provide service to the major projects and county levels. The net growth of the country level loan growth will continue to exceed RMB 1 trillion. In our businesses, in the agricultural-related business, we'll work with the improve the agriculture-related projects and national water networks and also comprehensive agricultural production capability and also taking the counties as a major vertical, we will provide service to the major projects and also have list-based service and supporting financing.

In terms of the agricultural enterprises, we'll focus on the leading agricultural industries and also leading agricultural technology companies, providing full cycle financial service. In terms of the farmers or farming households, we thoroughly carry out information finding or information collection for the farmers to expand the toolbox of farmers loans, try to have more than RMB 2 trillion of farmer -- RMB 2 trillion of balance of loans providing to farmers this year. And second, we'll further enhance our financial service capabilities, and we'll have 6-in-1 service systems, and we will also further promote relocation of inefficient outlets to townships, accelerating sinking financial service to more rural areas.

And this year, we'll strive to relocate 180 outlets to townships and also further increasing the development of agricultural assistance service stations throughout the combination of service stations, mobile service, further enhance our base financial service.

And this year, we will build around 3,000 -- last year, we have already built around 1,700. This year, we hope to have around 3,000 agricultural assistance service stations. And we'll innovate the innovative financial products and models for agricultural businesses, and we will roll out some new and diversified products and also use the smart bank tools in providing service to the rural areas for rural businesses and build have promoted the application of smart bank tools in the field of agricultural areas, farmers promote on-site plus remote investigations and build a system covering satellite, UAV and ground IoT and other agricultural data, enhance our support data supply capabilities for agricultural businesses.

And fourthly, we will ensure that this normalized financial assistance will be put at a prominent position, and we have already formulated a package of differentiated policies, and we will try to ensure that we lend targeted support or especially policy support to people who have just been lifted out of poverty and to ensure they will not return to their previous state.

We will focus on national and provincial level rural revitalization strategies and projects support underdeveloped areas in carrying out initiatives and form internal motivation for these assistance projects.

And fifthly, we will ensure the compliance and risk management work of the country-level regions and ensure that we manage or prevent risks at the source and ensure that the loans will have a very strict risk identification and monitoring process and also a series of risk monitoring models.

Next question please. You may ask your question.

I'm from JPMorgan Chase and banking analysis. My question is about the bond market. We have noticed that last year, the contribution of bond investment is actually pretty prominent. So what is your plans for this year's bond investment? And also what is your judgment on the bond interest rate for 2026?

President Lin, please.

Thank you for the question. From the perspective of the overall operation and management, we attach great importance to the financial market. And with our understanding about inherent loss of the financial market, basically 3 positioning. First of all, the level of the market and the level of the professionalism and also the level of talent that's 3 positioning.

And if we want to summarize this or the characteristics of ABC's financial market business, I think that it can be summarized in 3 key words.

First, big; second, stable; and thirdly, good. So first, large or big, it means that we are big in scale and stable means that we have been upholding prudent operations. So we are also very unwavering on that.

And the third point is good or good quality. That means that we have a pretty good outcomes. And it is also sustainable in the long term.

You are interested in bond investment business. Here at ABC, we have been committed to serving the real economy. We focus on improving our capabilities and optimizing asset allocations and better promoting and controlling risks to achieve high-quality development. You have mentioned bond investment has contributed a lot to the performance of ABC last year.

I think that's inseparable from the external environment and also at the head office, the investment decision-making committee as well as the overall investment team have made a very good analysis on the market, and they have a very targeted and precise investment strategy.

Looking back in 2025. At ABC, we have done 3 things right. First of all, with our strategic focus, we have cemented our investment foundation. While serving the real economy, we have improved our ability to make evaluations of the entire market as a core participator of the bond market.

The financial market managers of ABC has over RMB 10 trillion in bond assets. Therefore, we really value our ability to make macro assessment of the financial market. And we have been adhering to national policies as the guiding principle and also the economic loss as our guidance.

And we have been making proper evaluations of the macro policy curves as well as the dynamics of the economic environment, so that in the ups and downs or fluctuations of the market, we can identify opportunities and effectively address up to the place to manage and prevent risks.

We have to seize the opportunity of interest rate fluctuations and to really understand its reference. And this ups and downs and range fluctuations.

Take, for example, before the interest rate rebound window, we proactively compressed or duration and to cushion against the risk of rising interest rates. With our professional capabilities in practice, we can effectively stabilize market expectations.

And secondly, in our work, we have been serving strategic situation with more precise allocation.

In dynamic balance, we have achieved a new increase in scale and efficiency, facing international economic and trade landscape adjustment in 2025, the global financial market has been facing increasingly complex environment. So we have to focus our strategic focus and the strive to proactively or more proactively use a sophisticated and refined management strategies and approaches to prevent and control risks.

In particular, with our comprehensive income target as the goal, the RMB bond scale has increased by RMB 2.4 trillion, compared with the beginning of last year, and we have achieved a due growth in revenue and profit and also we have a better revenue structure or duration allocation has been more balanced. This has given us an edge and cushion against the cyclical fluctuations of the market.

Here, I think that it is important to highlight flexible or dynamic management and optimization of duration as well as the duration structure. We have to constantly strengthen the monitoring of potential risks coming from interest rate and exchange rates, so as to improve the forward-looking analysis and prevention of bond investment or credit risks.

Thirdly, as a major bank in China, we have been acting on national strategies and serving the real economy, we have advanced the Five Priorities. In the year 2025, ABC has taken a lead in underwriting national bonds and local government bonds and credit bonds and altogether, more than RMB 3.7 trillion, a year-on-year increase of 20 percentage points roughly.

So it is fair to say that we have supported implementation of active physical policy and the real economy. We have also been focusing on 5 major priorities. We have been continuing increasing our investment in industrial bond in green and low-carbon areas and technology innovation. These directions represent our top priorities. And by the end of last year, the green financing [indiscernible] balance has maintained a leading position, and we have also anchored our efforts in rural revitalization strategy. Our investment in that regard has increased by 300% and/or underwriting share ranked first in the market for this year.

And especially in the Sannong, where agriculture-related sectors, we have precisely allocated or investment portfolios.

And you're also interested in the bond strategy for 2026. We deeply feel that 2026 because it is the starting year for the 15th Five-Year plan, it is a pivotal year for us to build momentum and step into high-quality development as China's economy transforms itself.

Here at ABC, we have served the real economy and we have coordinated development and security and ensure we have a better coordination at a macro level. We have been maintaining stability while seeking progress in our financial market operations. But all at the same time, we emphasize that we have to really delve into structural opportunities in these cycles.

First of all, we have to improve our ability to assess different situations and support proper investment decision-making. So I think that you are also an expert in that regard. So I will not go into any details here. I believe that logic of global asset pricing has been undergoing profound changes. I should say that all of you might feel it to some extent.

And internally, we say domestically, our economy is now building momentum and the pricing signals are expected to recover and the monetory policy remains not really accommodative. The government bonds has increased and supply has increased, and the issuance has been also significantly front loaded.

And since the beginning of this year, the curve of the bond market yield has been more steeper. So we estimate that the bond market will take on a volatile trend. Credit bond as well as green and sci-tech bond will be even more active. The fluctuations were volatile or transaction or trading opportunities will coexist with those low volatility assets. And also in foreign markets, there will be increasing interplay between exchange rates, bond stock and commodity markets, so we have to have the overall picture in mind.

One important part of our work is to integrate all platforms at ABC and pull together the research power to conduct research across different markets, cycles, sectors and asset categories so that even in complex fluctuating scenarios, we can really lend ourselves our certainty. And secondly, we focus on national strategies to accurately empower the real economy.

First of all, we have used -- or adopted a proactive physical policy. We have been deeply integrated into modern industrial system. So here, we're focused on some of the modern and strategic emerging industries and also, we will intensify efforts to allocate more resources to high-quality industries.

And thirdly, we will advance Five Priorities, especially in pension finance, inclusive finance and green finance and so on. And next, we will continue to optimize our investment portfolio while controlling and preventing risks will ensure prudent growth.

Thirdly, we will give full play to our advantage as a major bank in China. We will deepen services for domestic and overseas investors, and we will continue to cement our core commercial functions, piggybacked on a full range of bond varities and pricing capabilities. We will continue to improve bond market liquidity and stability and improve our cross-market allocation capabilities.

On the other hand, piggybacked on the Bond Connect, Swap Connect and so many others or other mechanisms, we will ensure we provide better services for cross-border investors and leverage the advantages of domestic and international linkage and supports high-quality Chinese businesses to go global and expand their development channels.

And fourthly, we will empower or digital transformation with science and technologies. So we have to uphold the leading role of science and technology and digital means and risk control and prevention, bond and research and also so many other areas we have to have whole chain integration, and we ensure that AI is applied in different application scenarios, such as position management and pricing and trading so that we can improve for quantitative analysis and also intelligent investment decision-making and empower development or high quality development of ABC.

Thank you so much, Mr. [indiscernible]. Next question, please.

I am a financial analysist from [ CICC ]. What ABC has done in supporting the development of sci-tech businesses what are your best practices? And how will better develop the sci-tech finance business or the fintech business?

I think that I would like to take this question. We know that the technological finance is a very important part of our self-reliance and also the construction of a technological strong nation, and it also involves the construction of a modern industrial system and new quality predictive forces here at ABC.

As of the end of 2025, we have already provided services to over 350,000 technology-based businesses and the balance for loans is RMB 47,000. The annual growth rate is more than 20%. The coverage and overall loan volume has been at the forefront at this industry.

To be more specific, enhanceability of technology and financial service at ABC continued to carry the special actions to enhance the capability of technology and financial service in the whole bank, focus on Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area, Yangtze River Delta area, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Chengdu-Chongqing other high lines of technological innovation establishing 25 provincial and municipal level technology and financial service centers and building more than 300 specialized technology and financial branches established professional talent pool for technology and finance.

We have allocated professional equity investment personnel to each subsidiary and build a large number of financial technological and industrial professionals in the ABC Group. Second, we expanded the coverage of products and the services we have taken the lead, introducing guidelines for our technology and finance credit policies, promote the 5 [indiscernible] capabilities and 7 abilities on credit evaluation model inclusive to technology and enterprise -- technology enterprises in a build of full life cycle credit service system covering the institutes and the sci-tech parks and also the technology workers in total around 50 specific products and customers.

For example, in providing service to the agricultural technologies, we rolled out in the agricultural park science enterprise loan, especially also have the agricultural or machinery loan, effectively providing service to the leading agricultural technology enterprises.

And also, we provide the seed industry revitalization and also make good use of various policy tools. We know that in 2025, digital bank and other 7 departments issued a series of policy tools to support technology finance.

And ABC actively connected and implemented those policies.

We support the creation of a technology innovation on board in the bond market. The first batch of RMB 20 billion of commercial banking technology innovation bonds were issued while we increased the underwriting and investment in various market entities in science and technology, innovation bonds also underwrite an investment are at the forefront of the industry.

And also we implemented the policy -- monetary policy tools. And also, we signed a contract amount of loans and technology innovation, technological transformation has been achieved. And also, we participate in the policy and pilot projects -- we were the first to sign a RMB 50 billion of Social Security Science and Technology Innovation Fund in Zhejiang and Yangtze River Delta and also established 30 various types of science and technology innovation funds, including establishment of 18 AIC equity investment policy, city funds, and we have a full coverage of investment.

The cumulative lending [indiscernible] technology-based enterprise exceeded RMB 25 billion. Those measures have supported the development of technology innovation.

2026 is the first year of the 15th Five-Year plan period while fully focus and will get [indiscernible] in terms of the technology finance and to empower the new productive forces and provide service for the economy so as to contribute to accelerate the strength of China -- China's strength in science and technology.

First, we will provide service to the modernized industrial system, promote innovation technology to combine what were integrated with the industrial innovation, focus on the upgrading of traditional industries, focused on the new and future industries, focused on the modernized infrastructure, focused on the major national scien-tech projects to seize our targeted industries and customers, enhance our policy and resource support and enhance our professional service capabilities so as to accelerate the formation of new product forces.

And second, we have a full chain, full life cycle comprehensive or one-stop service by adapting to the laws and patterns of the innovation and also the growth pattern of the enterprises.

We will invest early, invest in small and investing in the long term and invest in the hard technologies and also continue to enhance our policy and support system. And also, we upgrade entire chain and entire cycle, the technology finance or financial service solution of ABC. We have the -- based on the advantage of ABC full license investment, lending bonds and leasing, consulting, [indiscernible] play to the role of AIC in serving technological innovation and equity investment.

We work with government agencies and also to research institutes and VC firms and other financial institutions to meet the comprehensive financial service demands of the enterprise to our customers. We accelerated the promotion and application of our data tools to adapt to the trend of digital and intelligent development, we deepened the AI+ empowerment of technology and financial service. We coordinated the deployment of our large language models and development of intelligent agents, optimize the service platform for industrial finance, which has registered now 5 million high-quality technology enterprises, enabling precise service capabilities and also make in-depth use of innovation, external data, such as innovation points, intellectual property and investment and loan linkages optimizing the precise evaluation model for technology enterprises and also use AI agent system that enhance our quality in providing service.

Thank you Mr. Wang. A question online, please take a common question that we haven't touched upon.

Well, this year is the first year for mandatory sustainability information disclosure. And the investors in the capital market are very interested in the sustainability of listed companies. Also, ABC is performing very well in ESG work. So what is progress of the sustainable development -- sustainable development and what are the next steps?

Thank you for the question. Well, we will disclose 2025 sustainability development in line with our annual report, in line with the new regulators and benchmarking to the international initiatives, demonstrating the performance of ABC in our sustainable development.

We actively implement a national strategy in sustainable development and incorporate the targets in responding to climate change in our day-to-day work management and business operations, enhance resilience through sustainable development, enabling the benefits to all stakeholders.

To be more specific, first, we focus on improving our governance and implement Chinese characterized financial governance. We incorporate the party leadership into our work and also enhance our sustainable topics, scope of the disclosure of sustainable development.

And the BOD is supervising, senior management is implementing and also the executive level effectively implementing the policies forming a connected governance chain and enabling the concept of sustainable development into the top-level design of business operations in the 15th Five-Year plan and further stimulating the quality and momentum of high-quality development. Second, we'll fully implement the green finance strategy. We steadily promote our own energy conservation and carbon emission reduction, actively practice the concept and take carbon peaking and carbon neutrality as our guide and actively guide capital to towards key areas such as carbon reduction, pollution reduction, green expansion and growth in terms of green finance, balance of green loan is nearly RMB 6 trillion and equivalent to an annual reduction of RMB [indiscernible] million tons of CO2 and RMB 66 billion of green financial bonds have been issued in China ranking first in the industry.

The balance of green bond investment has increased by 37%. In terms of ESG risk management, we have built ESG evaluation indicator, matrix system for our clients, launched ESG evaluation function for corporate clients. We also explored and conducted climate, risk stress test for agricultural, personal housing and wind power enterprise loans, applying the result of climate risk analysis investment and financing management.

And also in terms of our operations, we actively practiced green office green procurement and in green travel and the total carbon emission per capita of the whole group in 2025 have decreased compared with the previous year.

We always put people at the first place, enhance our -- to improve our people, employees well being. ABC will have a wide range of stakeholders. We take customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction at our core or at our priority, strive to give back to our shareholders, give back to the society, contribute to the society, continuously expand the accessibility of financial service mentioned and ABC will provide service outlets to cover all more than 2,800 country-level areas and making it the only bank to achieve a full coverage of country-level institutions or outlets.

In 2025, ABC has relocated and built 179 new outlets in rural areas or towns, further fulfilling the rural areas with insufficient financial service. And also in regular provision for mobile financial service has cumulative served 120,000 rural households. Agricultural service projects significantly enhanced service capabilities.

We built 3,308 elderly friendly service outlets with remote banking hotline providing service to senior customers throughout the year. We have 22,000 warm-hearted union service stations providing considerate service for outdoor workers and new citizens. More than 9,900 public welfare activities were held -- were launched. ABC has also thoroughly implemented the talent empowerment strategy for professionals and frontline young employees. We have implemented major talent projects for key groups, selecting over 2,200 young talents and adding 47,000 talents to talent pools of different levels and types, building 6,115 facilities for workers strive to create -- realize greater value for our shareholders. We also enhanced a 2-way interaction in the capital market for 3 consecutive years, ABC has led its peers in terms of total market capitalization growth.

We have maintained a high dividend payout ratio. We continue to shine the brand ABC philanthropy with full employment -- incremental 4 major actions of rural revitalization, protection care fulfillment and through donation volunteer service, mutual assistance and other means to provide a generation or benefit to the general public. And also, we have volunteer service hours exceeding 850,000 hours, and that has also given a recognition and a branding for ABC.

Moving forward, we'll continue to follow [indiscernible] strategy of national system of development, deepening the development of the management system and provide a better service to our customers and to our employees as well as respond to the concerns of stakeholders to ensure high-quality development through the sustainability practices to create a better value to our shareholders through the good sustainable practices.

We have a very thorough discussion today. For the sake of time, we will have one last question from the Beijing venue.

And from [indiscernible], I have a question on AI. Now AI is applied widely in banking sector in the management and business expansions and a lot of results have been achieved. And Mr. Wang also said ABC will vigorously promote application of smart AI in smart banks. So what achievements has been made and what measures have been taken?

Thank you for the question. My colleagues just now in their presentation also touched upon a little bit on the application of AI in smart banking development. AI is buzz for now, ABC also seized the opportunities of AI development.

We set up the specific office for smart banking development and also in [indiscernible] coordination. Also, we will focus on the AI agent application, focused on the project and also, we will build AI+ capability system to ensure the smart inclusive or wide-range use of AI. Past year achievements are reflecting the following aspects.

First, the accelerated our service, innovation and product innovation, we keep the accelerating the research and development of digital products. We have launched a fly handbag in way to provide the loans for drone operators, we also have a farmer e-loan. Also at the same time, we innovated technology finance credit products. We call that tech loan. And also scale of online credit business has increased. As at the end of last year, the balance of agriculture e-loan was RMB 6.8 trillion, an increase of 18.7% over the end of previous year, also improve the quality of efficiency of online service.

The monthly active users of personal mobile banking have been leading among their peers. We also rolled out the new version -- 5.0 version of the inclusive finance [indiscernible] build an online inclusive business covering multiple channels.

And also, we have increased in the efficiency and effectiveness of smart risk control. In terms of credit risk management, we have the on-site and off-site prelending due diligence, also deepened automatic identification and comparison of GPS positioning, image information, applied advanced technologies such as generative AI, strengthening multidimensional verification of real people, real events and real scenarios. We also continue to strengthen a centralized monitoring for the 5 group of customers in terms of the group customers and large medium-sized customers, small SME customer, personal loans and agricultural loans and also enhance our smart disposal platforms.

We have also achieved batch handlement or disposal of these cases so that we have promoted NPL disposal. AI can also empower anti-fraud efforts as well as anti-money laundering. The quality and efficiency have both been improved. And -- this can also help us to reduce our business burdens. For example, in terms of intelligent customer service, we can deepen application of AI models to fill in the forms, for example, and effectively reduce the burdens of frontline agents.

The average time required has been shortened to 176 seconds from more than 200 seconds. We have also speed up the construction or the development of intelligent investigation review report templates. The automatic generation ratio of this report data exceeds over 70% for small enterprises, credit recipients and group credit.

This has reduced the manual workload of credit personnel in drafting -- and just now our AI model mentioned by our senior management can also fulfill the smart or intelligent Q&A session. And this function can also empower the consumer protection or compliance and other processes. And this AI model, [indiscernible] has also won many awards, for example, in the recent Consumer Protection Day, the 15th of March has also announced that it has won the Financial Consumer Protection Golden Award for 10 outstanding cases in financial technology innovation services. So it is quite popular within our bank. And fourthly, AI is a systematic work. especially in terms of application in ABC, we have been systematically promoting the application of AI.

We already painted we mapped out a blueprint for AI application and compelled the AI capability map. And with a platform dedicated to AI application, we can promote it capacity building of computer power to successfully deploy multi-industry leading-edge models.

And this will also help us to develop even more model metrics regarding AI. Next step, with intelligent platform building, we will continue to improve the accuracy and convenience of financial services and also its inclusiveness.

Thank you so much, ladies and gentlemen, very big thanks from my bottom of heart for all of you in participating in this 2025 annual result announcement of ABC. We have implemented regulatory requirements and implemented an investor-oriented management approach and also clarified our mechanisms, targets and approaches for market capitalization management. We have appealed high-quality development and highlighted our features as well as serve the real economy as one of the major banks in China and strive to create more value for investors and shareholders and disclose the information in a timely manner.

Our stock prices and also valuation have all achieved improvement. Thank you again, all investors, analysts and friends from the media for your continued interest and support in ABC.

And I would also like to thank the senior management for your sincere sharing of the operating performance of ABC today. If you have any questions in the future, you are the most welcome to contact ABC's team. So that's all for today's result announcement conference. Thank you so much.

[Statements in English on this transcript were

spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]

Good afternoon. Welcome to 2025 mid-annual results conference announcement of ABC, Agricultural Bank of China. It's a great honor to communicate with investors, analysts and media friends, both on-site and online.

First, I would like to extend a warm welcome to all of you for your active participation. And sincere gratitude for your long-term attention and support to the development of ABC.

We have with us Mr. Li Lin, Vice President; Vice President, Mr. Wang; and Vice President, Mr. Wang Wenjin; and Madam Liu Qing, Secretary of the Board of Directors and also joining us are colleagues from online.

I would like to report to you the performance in 3 aspects. Let's first start with operational performance. In the first half of 2025, ABC firmly implemented decisions and arrangements of CPC, Central Committee and State Council adhered to its core responsibilities of serving the 3 rural issues and have maintained solid growth in key indicators.

There are 3 stabilities for the key indicators. One, the financial indicators are on the rise. In the first half of this year, net profit has up by 5.3% year-on-year. And also an operating revenue and income has both signatured at the positive growth. The growth rate has also climbed up by 0.7% and 0.4 percentage points in comparison to quarter 1 of this year.

Second, the asset quality has maintained and developed also further. The NPL ratio was down by 2 bps in comparison to the beginning of this year, special mention, it was down by 1 bp and overdue loan has maintained at a low level, 2.2%. The provision coverage has maintained over RMB 10 billion with a 95% coverage ratio, both the coverage ratio and coverage have been top one in all comparable peers.

The third is our business have developed. The new loans is RMB 129 million, 9.3% growth and the existing number of volume of the loan is over 2% than the comparable peers. Also, we have increasing growth rate of 7.8% of the personal loans, up by 7 bps comparison to last year. The -- both the volume and the growth of the average daily increment of deposit in domestic China have been top one of our comparable peers.

Let me report to you or work in the next half of this year, mostly in our 3 rural areas and risk control has also on the reforms of the products and services. One, we'll stick to the 3 rural projects and improve our service level. The 3 rural issues, agricultural rural areas and the farmers is our priority and cutting-edge advantages. We have adhered to the principle of serving the agriculture areas and farmers. Also, we aim to increase the quality and efficiency of the work in this regard.

In the first half of this year, the credit investment in these areas have standard at high growth for 2 years of consecutive growth and the investment in this regard has increased again on about RMB 900 million that has totaled the overall number of RMB 1 trillion. And also, we provide loans of about RMB 190 million for the inclusive loans for the farmers with a growth rate of 12.9%. In key areas, we supported the food security and safety of China's national strategy and expanded services in this regard for the launch for protection of food has increased by 23.7% year-on-year.

We also supported actively the rural and rural farmers development and expanded our investment in the development of business in rural areas. The loan increase has been 21.8% and 8.5%, a much higher than average growth rate of loans. As to the priority reasons of poverty alleviation, we have consolidated the poverty alleviation results in over 100 countries in the key areas. The balance of the loans for these areas have also grown at a higher speed than the whole bank's average. Also, we've expanded the loan support for the poor farmers and poor counties with an agreement of the new loans. We supported the farmers in Xinjiang province, particularly.

And if we take our loans for Tibetan farmers, the balance was RMB 426 million supporting and covering over 90% of the farmers there. Also this year, we have launched the top 10 products and services for the rural rejuvenation projects. We've expanded the outlets, online banking, mobile banking and a number of other services and products and channels in order to optimize these 3 rural issues services. Especially in the expansion of outlets, we have newly added the outlets in county level areas and township areas. Currently, there has been 56 percentage coverage of those counties in terms of the outlets.

Then we'll move on to the second part on optimization of our services. To serve the real economy is our top priority and to help the Chinese economic development and provide the investment for local economic social development has been on top of our agenda.

In terms of scientific and technological or fintech, we have optimized the scientific and financial support development. We have innovated and created offline products such as the [indiscernible] on credit loans and also issued a commercial loan of over RMB 200 billion.

Also we have signed the MOU with the [ NIA ] pilot cities with over 13 of such securities and bond programs. By the end of June, our loans in science and technological area has improved and grown by 61% year-on-year.

In terms of the green financing, we've also deepened the reform in this regard and incorporated green financing into our modern corporate structure management. We've issued green bond, green securities and also investment in this regard, expanding green leasing, green financial and wealth development projects and a number of other products and services The green financing business has a balance of RMB 572 million.

In terms of our support for micro and small businesses, we have expanded such support for those SME and inclusive services. By the end of June, the balance was RMB 4.24 trillion with the largest coverage of inclusive financing services and products. And also, we are the #1 in terms of the coverage and the strength of providing the inclusive financing services.

In terms of the services for the senior people, we also have expanded the number of the [ e-attention users ] as well as the holders. For our retail pension holders, the business volume has increased over 90% year-on-year. And also in the first half of this year, for the senior users and customers, we provided over 760,000 door-to-door services for those elderly people. By the end of June, the loan in this area is about RMB 61.2 billion, 46% year-on-year.

In terms of digital financing, we've made great efforts in the digital financing development. The loan in this regard was 13.7% year-on-year and the monthly average increment of retail consumers was #1 among our comparable peers.

We also have implemented key policies implementation in areas for financing and investment. And we've issued CNY 115 billion loans for the restoration and renovation of equipment. And also, we provided CNY 530 billion for the white paper list equipment and infrastructure. We also have supported more to the SMEs and private sector. By the end of June, there has been 13.1% of the loan provided to private sector.

And for the consumption and domestic consumption and boosting programs, we have nearly added over CNY 100 billion for the retail credit card services. The third part is that we have a consolidated long-term services for our customers. Customers are the backbone of our business, and we always see the requirements and demands of our customers and consumers as the top priority. It is, therefore, our job and mission to consolidate and enhance our personnel -- enhance our business to the customers. We adhere to the principle of being driven by the reform by digital transformation and by the different requirements and demand of the customers. We've also promoted finance plus -- not finance, service portfolio for the customers.

By the end of June, we have the top one number of clientele with over 880 million individual clients. With corporate clients, we also have improved comprehensive financing services and met their comprehensive requirements in the first half of this year. Our corporate clientele is over 12.9 million clients for corporate business.

The next part is our inherent driving force which is reform and the deepening of such reforms. We've, as always, enhanced our reforms in key areas, making the use of science and technology in transforming the technological renovation with AI plus technological renovation. We have implemented AI in a scale business. In areas of customer services and other scenarios, AI has been widely applied. At the same time, on empowering services and empowering operation, we have also deepened the role of digital transformation in areas such operating performances and a number of the other key scenarios.

We have optimized mobile banking and online and offline services, strengthening our ability to serve the customers. We also have piloted a new customer interface. With that optimization, there has been 20% increase in quality and efficiency. We also have put online the 2.0 version of corporate business -- corporate services, providing even more effective services for corporate clients. As for the smart loan and on-site operation, we have promoted the back-office work and also streamlined the workload for our front workers.

And also, we have laid a solid foundation for the risk control as our basic line. Risk control and management is the top line -- the bottom line for the business development. While we are strengthening the risk management at the all fronts, we've also taken a grasp of financial risks, technological risks as well as market risks in control, so that we can make sure this safety and security of the services in the business.

First of all, we need to be proactive and primitive in risk control and management. We have to modify the product structure, so as to set up a systematic framework for fending off from those risks. And at the same time, we need to accelerate the resettlement and treatment of the nonperforming loans and better improve and optimize the platform of market risk control and management. We also need to improve risk monitoring and keep a close track on the market development and pay close attention to our risk disclosure. It is expected that our risk level is at a controllable area.

We've already actually realized the stress testing of the PBOC and the active daily transaction has been increased by 7.2%. Net profit has already maintained very good momentum. So basically, now I would like to report to you the operating outlook for the second half of this year. I think you are very actually interested in this part. From the macroeconomic condition, the economic development in China has shown great resilience and vitality. And with the macro -- positive macro policies in China, there will be a continuing policy by the central government.

From ABC's situation, thanks to the good momentum macroeconomic, I think the NIM will turn for stable and growth will maintain steady and we'll also keep very good momentum in terms of operating efficiency. So going forward, in the next half, we'll continue to do a good job in pricing and balanced risk management and profitability. While serving the real economy, we hope that we can actually realize stable profit growth and return to the investors.

We will continue to do the volume work. Firstly, we'll continue to focus on the current business development, maintain good momentum in our financials. Secondly, we will continue to support country economy. We will take more measures and with good services to better serve the country economy.

Thirdly, to continue to serve the 5 financial chapters and to seize the opportunity of the economic development and better serve the real economy. Fourth one is to deepen reform and opening up, especially. Fifth, we will continue to focus on the risk management prevention in key areas as to actually maintain the sound momentum of our business development.

So much for my presentation. Now we will enter into the Q&A session. Board Secretary Madam, Liu Qing, please moderate the session.

Thank you, President Wang. Now we're going to enter into the Q&A session. All the representative, please only raise one question. Before raising the question, please identify yourself. So firstly, the question goes to the lady on the first row.

I'm from Xinhua News Agency. Just now I heard President Wang's presentation. We noticed that actually currently, we faced with the environment of low interest rate. No NIM. So I think ABC has maintained very good momentum with good operating income and profit growth. So I would like to ask you, looking into the second half, how can ABC better actually balance the pricing, the return and risk management and maintain the sound economic business growth?

Thank you. Thank you for your question. I will continue to answer -- I'll take this question. As you mentioned, in the first half, based on our positioning, we seek to the general term of taking progress, while maintaining stability and to improve operating efficiency. So we actually maintained a steady growth in the first half. And we talked about the data about operating income and et cetera. So you can see from the data that in terms of profitability, the profit growth has been improved. Financials has been actually turning for the better, and we are more resilient in terms of growth.

In terms of business structure, the business revenue have been increased. There has been positive growth in the operating income, both after pre-provisioning. And we can see that we have a very good momentum of fundamental in this aspect. And we have a solid growth foundation.

Looking to the second half, from the macro level, as I mentioned, China's economy has continued to maintain a steady momentum with good resilience and vitality. So in the first half, we can see a package policy initiatives by the central government to support the real economy, and this has been quite effective. And I believe that the effects will continue to take on in the future.

And secondly, for the -- a lot of central conferences and also the progress of work and solvency projects, and also, there are some like personal consumer loan policies, including interest subsidies, all these policies at the micro level, macro level will continue to coordinate with each other and promote our economic growth to turn for the better. And this will also provide very good external environment for ABC's development. And based on ABC's development, I can see that the development for ABC has also maintained a very good foundation here, which gives us more confidence for future challenges.

So I believe that going forward, ABC will continue to maintain our positioning and to actually rise to the challenges and to also rise to these uncertainties with our stabilities. Focusing on revenue growth, profitability and also the asset quality control, we will continue to consolidate the momentum of sound and stable business growth and provide a greater return to the investors and generate greater profits. We'll continue to balance the development and to continue to strengthen the coordination among different aspects.

In terms of scale, we will try to optimize the business growth structure and to further dig the needs for our business development and also to better allocate our investment in government bond and local government bond and to continue to balance the business growth.

In terms of NIM, we'll continue to balance the pricing, especially the granularized pricing and to actually improve the asset growth or return, return on assets. And we'll also continue to increase -- to actually reduce the cost of liabilities.

Secondly, we'll continue to balance the cost and income. So we will continue to strengthen the cost, the control and also follow the government requirements and continue to actually focus on control the fees, especially the flexible fees in order to save the expenses, reduce the expenses. And also we'll continue to improve the efficiency of our business operations as to actually reap more profits with less input.

Thirdly, we will try to ensure sustainable development. Asset quality stability is actually the foundation of our profitability. So we will continue to balance the safety and security with business growth, especially we'll focus on the risk management -- credit risk management in real estate sector and et cetera, so as to control NPL and also to improve our asset quality and lay a solid foundation for profitability. We'll also continue to ensure the collection of NPLs. All in all, we are actually confident about the second half performance. Thank you so much for me.

Thank you, President Wang. Now the next question, please. The friend from the front row.

I'm from CCB Merchant Securities. So I would like to congratulate ABC senior management and staff for the achievements we've made in the first half despite the challenging environment. So my question is about NIM. So we see that the NIM decline has been narrowed down. That is to say it has been turning for stability. It has already been like around 3.1%. So I would like to see what's our perspectives for NIM development, especially for the second half? Do you think there will be a turning point for NIM?

Thank you for your question. This question is highly relevant to the previous one, so I will take this question. As you mentioned, for the first half, our NIM was around 1.32%. That's 10 bps lower than that of last year. So from this figure, we can see that the operation of ABC is quite good because we balanced the business development and sustainability of our business development. And from this result, from the asset side, I think we have been balancing the scale and the return. And also, we actually focus on country development and et cetera. You should see that we have ensured the growth in terms of the interest-generating assets, and we've been optimizing the asset structure and increase the ratio of the assets with higher return.

For the first half, for -- on the new loan, the rate has been relatively good, which actually kind of mitigate the NIM downward trend. And we have been following the central government's policies, taking various measures to also better develop their liability business. So on one hand, we follow through the government policies, including the package of policies by the PBOC and other regulators and also the lower down of deposit rate. So we can see that the effects will continue to be unleashed continuously in the future, which is conducive for us.

In the meantime, we continue to actually better realize the reduction of the cost of liability side business. And we've been continuing to lay a solid foundation for our future development. So as I mentioned in my presentation, we'll continue to promote the basic work, including customer base and deposit growth. So you can see that we've been improving our customer segmentation ability and so as to create a very good environment for us to attract low-cost assets. And this has reduced the liability side cost.

So for RMB loans, the interest cost has been reduced. So we've also maintained a very good position among our peers. That is to say to this has been very effective in stabilizing the NIM.

And looking into the second half, we believe that the NIM of ABC will turn in for stability. From asset side, the LPR downward growth -- well, downward development will continue to promote the repricing of existing deposit loans. There will be still pressures, of course, through our efforts and our structural adjustments and also our risk pricing philosophy, we have continued to conduct differentiated loan pricing and differentiated pricing. So this can actually help us to stabilize the NIM.

Liability side, as I mentioned, we are reducing the cost. So with the repricing of deposits and also the reducing of liability side of cost, we believe that the cost will continue to be reduced with the policy by this central government. This will also help us to better improve the NIM. So based on the above indicators and factors, we believe that the NIM will continue to maintain stable marginally. Thank you so much for me.

Thank you, President Wang. The next question, please. The friends from the back row.

I'm from the CCTV. So this year, the central government said about promoting consumption and growth. We know that ABC has -- personal loans has exceeded RMB 9 trillion. Can you actually share more details in this aspect? And also under the regulatory requirements, what are the new measures taken by ABC?

So this question goes to Vice President, Lin Li.

Thank you for your question. In the recent years, ABC has been sticking to the principle to better support the rural and urban development, focus on expanding consumption and rural rejuvenation and to continuously to extend loans to personals or individuals so as to promote economic growth. But end of June, the personal loans of ABC, that is CNY 3.87 trillion, with a growth of CNY 9.3 trillion and NPL is 1.18%, generally stable. For personal mortgage loans, we have extended over CNY 300 billion and personal operational loans have increased by CNY 420 billion or so.

The incremental loan is over CNY 200 billion. And for the retail loans with a growth rate -- growth, an increase of over RMB 100 billion. For the credit cards, the increase in loan volume is RMB 51.3 billion. So for the operating indicators for the first half for the retail business, we have shown several features. One, we have given the full slate of inclusive financing and 3 rural issues development. We've supported micro businesses and SME, which have been incorporated into our daily operation. At the same time, we also have been deeply involved in the consumption boosting services in innovating on-site and remote operations and other new models.

We've also made full use of the local situations, improve our service level so as to meet the different demands of the SMEs, self-employed shoppers and other consumers. At the same time, we have expanded the country-level business services, we have improved the loans for the shoppers and stores. And we've expanded the services for the farmers in rural areas and covered the expanded coverage of rural areas. For the farmers who have just been alleviated from poverty, we have increased over 60% of the new loans provided to those newly alleviated poverty areas.

And the next part is on the boosting of domestic demand. This is mostly targeted at the national policy and plan of stimulating new demand for the domestic consumption. These are -- there are 3 news in this part of business. We have implemented the overall planning and program on optimization interest rate, credit issuance and a number of other important factors to provide more provision and supply of credit loans. And also, we have increased loan provision for key areas such as tourism and the senior care. We have innovated a number of loan products and also combined the portfolio of different loans.

For the consumption loans, it varies. It would also expand the maturity from 5 years to 7 years. And for the customers with a good intention to pay back, we have provided a variety of payment methods. And also, we've incorporated the individual performances and credibility as the indicators to better satisfy the demand of the consumers and the residents in their participation of such consumption loans.

Recently, the Chinese government has provided a dual subsidy policies for the consumption loans, and we have provided with them a dedicated team in the specific policies and measurement. We've also strengthened the trainings on our staff so that they can provide better services when they are providing the consumption loan services to our -- to the consumers.

And the third is to provide a new vitality in the real estate market recovery. For example, on the renovation of dilapidated houses in the rural areas and also in renovating the backward areas, we have increased our loan provision.

We've also supported the urbanization of the areas and expanded the services in the existing areas and expanded our services for new customers, even the migrant workers from rural areas to cities. In this regard, we have improved the quality and efficiency of a combination of work style, achieving great results.

The fourth feature is that we have expanded and strengthened the coordinated efforts to better meet and adapt ourselves to the economic development cycle. We are steadfast in improving the compliance work and risk control and prevention mindset into market accession as well as customer accession and other business systems.

We also have strengthened a whole lifetime management of our customers. At the same time, we've made full use of digital transformation and empowerment. We have reiterated the digital utilization of the whole bank and established the digital credit systems of the whole bank.

For the personal and individual loans, we have a monthly revision and review of the retail loans in order to optimize the risk prevention and also an early warning of the risk management. And we have done a very good job in terms of the settlement of NPL to make sure the overall quality of asset. In the next stage, we will improve our services and business of retail loans to a higher level of quality. We will strive to do the right things even better. That is the end of my answer. Thank you.

Thank you very much, President Li. Next question, please.

The overall asset quality of ABC has stable -- been very stable, and NPL is at a low level. So my question to management is that how do you see real estate market and the local government vehicle, how do you fend off the risks in this area?

Thank you for the question. Also, this question goes to President Lin again.

Thank you for the question, and thank you for your interest in risk control work of ABC. We will continue to do better in this regard. Actually, from perspective of risk control, we have adhered to the core principle of risk prevention and strengthened the overall management of systematic risk control ability of the whole bank. We've been very proactive and primitive in risk prevention and control and the ability has improved year-on-year with a stabilized quality of the asset.

As the President has introduced to us the NPL and asset management of the bank by the end of June, the NPL is 1.28%, down by 0.02 percentage points. Special mention, 1.39%, down by 0.01% in comparison of the beginning of this year. The expected -- sorry, the overdue is 1.22%, which is also a low level among our comparable peers. Actually, important indicator for overdue is that our overdue and special -- and NPL has kept a negative gap between them. And the provision has increased to a number of over CNY 1 trillion. We have 99.5% coverage ratio, highest among the peers. And also, we've maintained a good picture in the risk prevention control.

And as to the questions that you are concerned about the key areas, one is in the real estate market. This business has maintained a stable development. We've actively implemented the mechanisms for real estate development financing so as to provide the targeted services for real estate market. And also, we've strengthened the real estate project precision management and promoted the risk control and risk disclosure. By the end of June, the NPL was down by 0.05 percentage points in comparison to the beginning of this year.

And also, we have mitigated the local government loans. One, we have adhered to these policies and measurement and made sure that we have the hidden loans and the existing local government loans will be continuously paid back. And we have adhered to the marketized and rule-by-law policies and support the reasonable requirement for financing and reject firmly any violations or infringement of such irregularities. By the end of June for the inclusive financing services, we have also kept a similar picture of growth in comparison to the peers. The overall risk has been under control.

For the inclusive financing services and loan products, we are among the best of all comparable peers. So objectively speaking, in spite of the pressure on the asset quality, we will continue to adhere to being precautious and being stable, and we will grasp hard the principle of risk management and prevention. We are confident that the asset quality of ABC will be stable and also be among the best of the peers. We will tackle the major problems and contradictions, seek innovations and creation so as to make efforts in 2 areas. One, we will improve the overall system of inclusive financing loan systems. We optimize the credit authentication models and strengthen the cross validation of the credibility of those products.

Second, we will also strengthen the digital risk prevention systems using digital technologies as the tools to strengthen the risk analysis for inclusive financing and other micro loan products.

Third, we will strengthen the work for the settlement of the NPL special mention and overdue. We will have early warning of this overdue and a special mention and strengthen the work for the smart settlement of the NPL in order to improve the quality and efficiency of the bad loan treatment. And also, we will strengthen the focus on the key areas.

In real estate or property market, we have a project-based agenda and approach for different real estate projects. We will comprehensively use the 16 articles of financing work provisions and policies, actively analyze the risks of the real estate market so as to implement those policies and make sure the overall risks can be better mitigated.

In terms of the local government loans, for key provinces or areas, we have a special policies and also product services for those areas and governments. We will optimize the existing loans and lower down the risk exposure.

Also, I'd like to make a special note here. We will stay stick card to the bottom line of no new increment of the NPL. And at the same time, we will also follow the rules of -- rule by law and the rule by the marketization to increase new business in this regard. And as I said, we will be very proactive in restructuring the business as we are implementing the national's policy on supporting the transformation of the conventional industries in solving the contradictions. On the supply side and on the demand side, we will manage earnestly the existing loans. And also for backward capacity and the loans for certain clients, we will have a bigger pressing on them so as to make sure the overall risk level is under control. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Lin, for your elaborated answer on asset quality. Now let's welcome questions from online participants.

I'm from Bank of America. So I would like to ask a question as to ABC, how can ABC support external economy? We know that ABC has maintained sound development in terms of businesses and there's been increasing vitality. So my question is, how in the first half, while promoting opening up and supporting foreign trade, what has ABC done in this respect and going forward, how can ABC leverage its own advantages to better support the external-oriented economy?

Thank you for your question. So this question goes to Vice President, Wang Wenjin.

Thank you for your question. So at the beginning of the year, ABC has been implementing the decision-making by the central government. We have been trying to promote the high-level opening up and stabilize the foreign trade and attract foreign investment. And we've also been trying to support the foreign trade and economy. In the first half, the foreign settlement is around CNY 800-or-so billion, has been increasing and international business growth has been increasing by 39%. So we've making a lot of measures in this aspect.

First one is to better serve the economy to better control the Belt and Road initiative and also the cooperation between China and its surrounding nations and also the inter connection between Hong Kong and Mainland China and also Macau with Mainland China. And for international settlement and financing business, this is around CNY 131.9 billion. And we've also implemented various measures to better promote the interconnection and et cetera. Altogether, there are 15 such measures.

And to innovate the -- a lot of these foreign trade-related loans and also, we've promoted the cross-border settlement and payment. We support the foreign friends in China to actually open account. And also, we have the action plan. For the first year, foreign trade account settlement was around CNY 40 billion or so, and we continue to support foreign trade development.

We focus on mechanics, mining industry and et cetera, to strengthen the international settlement and trade finance. For the first half, we have served 1,800-plus customers to actually settle international business with around the total volume of over CNY 200 billion.

For the first half, the agro-related trade finance was around RMB 5.8 billion, up by 5% or so. The cross-border trade commerce and other international settlement was around CNY 19.2 billion. And we'll continue to provide service for foreign trade to better actually reform the ForEx business. And the customer coverage and et cetera, have already been improving. A lot of payment and payment facilitation business has already been improved, growing by 20.5%. For the MSE in foreign trade, we try to actually establish a risk-sharing mechanism. So for export insurance-related business, it has increased by 70% year-on-year.

We continue to host a lot of these education conferences or seminars for risk management to better serve the economy. Going forward, we'll continue to follow through the national policies on high-level foreign trade and opening up and to strengthen this interconnection between Mainland and overseas market and to better support foreign trade and continuously improve the services for trade facilitation, cross-border trade facilitation. First one, leverage our own advantages will continue to improve the service efficiency and quality, especially in the marginalized areas. We have wide coverage, especially in the rural areas, and we support the B and R initiative and our cooperation with surrounding nations.

Going forward, we'll continue to develop the policies to better support our cooperation with the neighboring countries in trade and finance, and we'll also strengthen the industrial liaison and our services to better serve the foreign trade. And secondly, we will continue to help companies to expand the market, especially with focus on agro-related and green businesses and to better serve customer settlement and financing needs. We'll also continue to better serve the micro and small enterprises, especially their financing needs and optimize the AU service model.

We'll continue to cooperate with the quality third-party payment institution to improve their basic infrastructure. And we'll also continue to play as an important platform. We will utilize the foreign-related letter of guarantee and to better serve our companies to better go global.

Thirdly, we'll continue to conduct innovation and transformation so as to better improve the trade facilitation for our customers. And we'd like to improve the reform quality and efficiency. And we will continue to stabilize the ForEx businesses and to better cover our customers in this area. We'll also continue to promote digitalized transformation to better serve our customers by leveraging technology, and we'll continue to better support the payment facilities of facilitation for foreign friends here in China.

Thank you, President Wang. And the next question goes from on-site, the friends in the middle.

I'm from the First Finance. So my question is about retail finance and pension finance. We see in the report, the customer amount has reached around RMB 880 million, so we can see a trend that in China, we have this aging population. So this aging population is actually important customer group. So going forward, what is our thinking in seizing this opportunity to better actually lay out our business?

So this question goes to our Vice President, Lin Li.

Thank you for your question. And I'm very happy to take this question. Pension business, health care is actually a topic concerning people's well-being. And we also feel that this is also a very important topic and also a virtue for us to better support the older generation. So for ABC, the personal customer base has been expanded. So currently, the base is 880 million. So for people over 55 years old, that is around 300 million. So we'll continue to serve this customer group. This is also our responsibility.

In terms of operation and management, we, from ABC, are trying to creating the business platform to better serve the aging population. So it is also an important part of the pension finance of the 5 financial priorities of the central government. So we will continue to focus on the 3 aspects.

The first one is to focus on functions that is to optimize the service supply for agent finance. So we'll continue to play a leading role in it to focus on the pension finance to better serve the population with better service and products. Firstly, we'll continue to better serve old care. Especially we have this electronic social security card and we have also attracted a lot of users in this aspect. We maintained a leading position in serving the aging population in this aspect.

Secondly, we'll continue to serve the MSEs, especially the customer number has also ranking the top among our peers, and we'll continue to also better support the rollout of individual pension fund. And for personal pension accounts, the investment products has already also been reaching 200 plus. This is also quite outstanding among our peers. And we'll continue to promote the complex services, including equity, bond and et cetera, so as to better serve our customers.

By the end of June, the pension loans that is around CNY 226 billion, private-owned companies loans account for over 50%. And certainly, we'll continue to build the ecosystem. So we will have the scenario plus -- product plus so as to build an open-ended diversified full-stop or one-stop financial service. We'll also continue to work with the Ministry of Civil Affairs and also other information systems to better cooperate with local government to better actually serve -- or provide service in this aspect. We've also conducted many different services by cooperating with different departments or agencies so that we can better expand the services for the pension-related businesses.

And secondly, we'll continue to improve the efficacy and quality of our pension finance through innovative services, digital empowering, we'll continue to promote high-quality pension services. Firstly, we'll continue to implement the high-level service strategy. So we'll continue to raise people's awareness, take more actions with many different dimensions to better conduct the business. And we will also continue to provide differentiated services to meet the needs of the customers and cover the full cycle of their needs and demands and to build the intelligent pension service.

Secondly, we'll continue to have a more extensive product shelf to better match the needs with our products. And we have realized 6 category, 77 items related financial products. So covering different aspects, financial wealth management, industrial fund, operational loans, retail and et cetera. And we will -- these customers can also get money on a monthly basis. We can ensure -- we can actually provide a portfolio of products for customers to better combine insurance, wealth management and et cetera, to better improve the people's health care service capabilities.

And thirdly, we actually have the big models like AI intelligence development to better upgrade the development. We continue to upgrade our service. We have this intelligent product recommendation and et cetera, so that we can better improve our service in this regard. Thirdly, we'll continue to focus on financial inclusion and also develop our features in this aspect. We will leverage our wide coverage and presence and to better serve the customers. We'll take the initiative to provide more services for our customers so that we can actually provide quality service in this aspect.

The first one is service channels more diversified. So last year, we've realized the renovation of the agro-related outlets. So we specified, optimized 3 types of working measures, altogether 22 such measures targeted at aging or senior clients. We'll continue to improve the service efficiency and quality. And in this process, we'll continue to actually focus on the high-frequency services so as to avoid many difficulties facing by the aging population.

We have calculated that the average efficiency has improved by 49%. The outlets will be the home -- sweet homes for the senior customers. For mobile banking, we've also upgraded the senior services and remote and hospital services, medical services and a number of other financial services.

In the first half of this year, over 4 million people have got access to the one-stop services for online banking. And at the same time, we also have provided the services for the groups of populations, including those senior people with over several times more of such services. And also, we have opened the further outlets and innovated the inclusive financing services for the rural areas and provided mobile services for the senior care services to lower areas and county level and township level areas.

And third, we have provided the services with a touch of warmth. The senior care services have been stipulated at the bank level. We provide 3 heart services, patients and carefulness and a heart of love for the senior people. Of course, we also need to strengthen the convenience, security and safety of those services. In [ BJ ] branch of Zhejiang province, they have won the award of the national top services for senior people. And another example was set in a local branch here in Beijing. We hope to provide our senior people with professional, high-efficient services to them. Thank you. That is the end of my answer.

Thank you very much Mr. Li Lin, for your answers. Next question, please.

I'm from [ Magasin Securities ]. I have a question concerning the 3 rural issues, it has been on our major business and the feature of the business. We recently have seen great contributions in this regard. So in the future, how do you plan to do the 3 rural work in order to consolidate your cutting-edge advantage? And also, the services of ABC have expanded over rural and urban areas. So what is your next movement in supporting the national economic social development?

This question goes to Mr. Meng.

Thank you for the question. I would like to answer the first question from 3 aspects. ABC is deeply rooted in agriculture, rural and farmers. Therefore, to serve the 3 rural program and initiative is our top agenda. For recent years, we have diversified the structure of customers and provided a holistic system of products and services. The 3 rural initiative is our main business scope. As for this, our balance of 3 rural areas, it accounts for over 40% of the total volume. And the growth rate for this year has been higher than the average growth rate of other sectors loan. And we have strategized the 3 rural affairs and consolidated our development in this regard.

First, the key hydro power projects have been expanded at the country level. The special national bond of extra-long maturity or period and the large-scale investment in rural areas have been developed at the national level. Also, they are demanding -- there are demands for the financing for those large-scale projects.

Second, new energy vehicles and the old for new of the household appliances. These policies have played a solid foundation for our services in serving the new rural areas and even with a new growth point in the business.

Third, the infusion and integrated development of rural and urban areas have made it possible for the flow of capital as well as human resources between rural and urban areas. Different modes have prospered in rural areas, which made it easier for us to provide even more precise financing services and provide us with new track for the business enhancement and development. Therefore, on the topic of rural rejuvenation, we will do our contribution in the building of a country of strong agriculture development.

We'll take even more measures to serve the rural areas better in 4 aspects. One, we will deepen the assistance services for the key areas. We consolidate the results of poverty alleviation and strengthen support for Tibet areas for their financial services and satisfy the capital requirement of those key areas so as to prevent from the -- going back to the poverty.

And second, we'll focus on the development of the rural industry development and the national key projects such as the food safety and security. We'll innovate new products and services, providing the guarantee services for the overall rejuvenation of rural areas.

And third, we will continue to expand the service channels so as to increase our reach among the rural areas. We are now developing over 1,400 outlets in rural level, improving the quality at those outlets. And at the same time, we are launching a special edition and services for the senior people and farmers in rural areas. We provide door-to-door services.

And fourth, with science and technological environment -- empowerment, we aim to improve the 3 rural smart banking services, optimize loan provision and application services for our farmers.

As for the second question, we have attached great importance to the strategy of regional coordination and balanced development. We have strengthened our support for financial provision. At the same time, we've made quite a few achievements in this regard. On the one hand, on the overall and comprehensive positioning of different regions. And in the light of the advantages and the features, we have made regional development programs and a differentiated development initiatives.

We've strengthened the efforts in supporting the Yangtze River Delta areas and deepened the finance plus services on the basis of the hydropower project, we have incorporated green development into our overall business and in developing the Yangtze River Delta economy. At the same time, for the remote areas and ethnical regions, we have also expanded such services to them. Recently, we have issued and provided the action plan for the companies and enterprises in Tibet areas. At the same time, we've improved the synergy of financial services by optimizing the service models and enhancing the initiative, we have better synergize the work front and promoting the integrated development of rural and urban areas in Northeastern part of China and support Chengdu, Chongqing dual cities and the industrial transformation in Eastern part of China. And also facilitate the transportation development of China. That's all for the answer.

Thank you very much, Mr. Meng. Also a question for online participants. Please select a new question from the online participants. I will read the question to you. For private sector and SME who are the pillar of the real economy, the ABC service to them has been the pioneers. In terms of the key indicators, ABC has led the industry, so what is your measures that you have taken to support private sector and SME and the micro business and how to sustain their current development momentum? Okay. This question goes to President Wang.

It's my great pleasure to answer this question. For the first part, this year, ABC implemented the Central Committee and State Council's deployment, taken all responsibility in developing private sector and providing inclusive financing services. We have maintained sound momentum. By the end of June, private sector balance of the loan is CNY 7.39 trillion, and inclusive loan is CNY 4.24 trillion. For micro loan and business -- corporate business, we have over several thousand -- several hundred thousand among the first of our comparable peers. The overall service ability and service quality have taken the lead in the industry.

In order to further improve our financial service quality to SME and micro businesses, we've done the work in the first half of this year in 3 areas. One, we strategized our service to SME and small micro business to a higher level. We've listened very carefully to the important remarks made by President Xi, and we remobilized the resources in the efforts for the micro business and SME. We have established a mechanism for the support of SME and micro business. The support has expanded to science and technology, consumption, foreign trade and other sectors. And we've served over 2.7 million micro businesses with overall volume of loan over RMB 300 million.

In terms of the number of the clients and also the total volume of the loans provided to them, we are among the top of our peers. And at the same time, we have consolidated and strengthened the acceleration for the micro business and small business services and improving the financial services quality. Second, we have made full play of the empowerment of science and technology with AI, big data and other new technologies. We have empowered private sector and SME and micro business in the whole cycle, improving the efficiency and quality and enhancing the experiences.

Third, we've worked on the mechanism. We've given full play to the advantage of ABC's wide coverage and optimizing the financial service system and improving the ability to serve SME and micro businesses.

In terms of the scale of the loans and exemption of net value and worth, we have optimized the service model in order to improve and increase availability and accessibility of the loans.

And for the second -- next question, the overall risk is under control and the overall momentum is very sound and healthy. I think that it can be attributed to 3 adherences. One, adhere to the high-quality development mode. To support SME micro business is the requirement for developing the economy and also the practice of serving the real economy and the people. ABC adheres to the principle of solving problems in the process of development so that we want to solve the problems of lack of accessibility and availability of the loans. Therefore, we would like to take our responsibility of a national bank.

And second, we adhere to the online and offline integration of services. We have iterated risk control models, set up an intense net for the risk management so as to control the risks from the sources. And -- so we continue to innovate the service model and diversify the service channel. We will also improve the fraud risk prevention and control and prevent any possible risks in this aspect. We will also try to prevent the gray business in this aspect.

Third, we'll continue to strengthen the intensive management. We will utilize AI, big data to develop the intelligent service so as to better serve the economy. And also, we will utilize the PAD or tablet utilization in our service offering. And we will also continue to better serve our customers by offering diversified services as to improve customer experiences. So much for me. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Wang. I think we have conducted very intensive exchanges. So the last question, please. Friend from the left.

I'm from [ Hong Kong Wenhui Newspaper ]. So I have a question on loans. We noticed that for the first half of this year, the loan growth is 7.3%. So I would like to ask the key loan extension will be going to which areas? And also secondly, we've just concluded the central government meeting. So in terms of urban development, will we actually offer loans in these areas to increase loans in these areas?

Thank you for your question. I will take this question. Just now, in our introduction, we mentioned that the loan extension for the first half has been increasing. So apart from the increase, we also have improved the loan structure with targeted extension in certain areas. So in the next half, we'll continue to -- we'll continue such a trend. That is to say, right now, the central government has a lot of policy in place and the effects will gradually unleash and this will lay a solid foundation for our loan extension. We'll follow the macroeconomic policies and market needs. We'll focus on the strategic direction of the national government and extend loans to the key areas and industries as to maintain reasonable growth of our loan business. In the meantime, we'll also continue to maintain a good momentum.

For specific areas, I think I will maintain, in general, the same trend with that of last year. First, we will focus on the main businesses. So in the second half, we'll continue to maintain this sound momentum and to better serve the food industry, the agro businesses, the rural households and also the technology development in the rural area or in the agro-related business. We'll continue to promote the agro-related loans, the country-related loans. Secondly, we'll continue to better serve the rural economy, including promoting the implementation of the 5 financial priorities. And also, we'll continue to implement the national policies of the central government and also to better promote the recovery of the real estate sector and also we'll continue to boost consumption and to better promote the macro economy turning for the better. So this is the second aspect.

Thirdly, and as you mentioned, the Urban City Development Conference was convened, and we are studying this conference with spirit, especially its possible impact on our business development. I think going forward, we'll continue to better balance our business structure and also to accelerate the optimization of our credit strategy, revitalize the credit assets and also focus on the low carbon development. In the meantime, we'll continue to connect with different cities in terms of their city development projects. And we will continue to also support the guarantee housing for the residents.

And in addition, we will also promote the stable growth of personal loans, which includes the personal mortgage loans and also the personal consumption loans, especially the increased subsidy for the personal consumption loans. We'll also focus on the appliance, on the automobiles-related secretary and also the green consumption, digital products-related consumption and also the -- change the old products for new products related financial services and to better improve the consumption loan coverage. I think through our efforts, we hope that we can actually realize reasonable growth of our loan size and quality. Thank you.

Thank you, President Wang. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for joining the interim performance release. And I appreciate all the media friends, the analysts for your support and attention to ABC, and we will also continue to communicate with you. Should you have any questions, please contact our public investor department. So much for today's meeting. Thank you.

[Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]